In The Absence of Sun
by gschelt
Summary: Reparative therapy was meant to silence it. The years home schooled all alone in that big house were meant to lock it away. But enrolling at Arendelle Prep was the worst thing that could have ever happened to that plan for the Senator's daughter. AU Elsanna, rated M for language, drug use, character death, and eventual *sexual explicitness*.
1. Chapter 1

_**A/N**: I haven't updated anything in a year and a half, and I feel awful that I'm basically abandoning everything else I've left halfway done, but my writing has changed so much in that time and it wouldn't feel right to pick up with something I'd already started. _

_So I'm starting fresh with a fandom that's really surprised me with its vigor and depth. I want in on it. I want to flex my writing muscles and explore these characters._

_This is pretty AU. No sisters, no powers. This story is my way of fleshing out a different interpretation of the canon story. I've outlined about nine or ten more chapters of this length - and by outlined I mean actually planned out, so I have no excuse not to update. If I go more than three or four days, I need a good sharp poke._

_So, happy reading! Please let me know what you think, and enjoy the ride with me._

_5/4/14 edit: I realized that I ought to add a trigger warning for what some may consider self harm. I don't necessarily see it as such, but just to be safe, I'm putting that out there._

**. . .**

Seven forty-nine a.m. on Tuesday, the first of September.

Why was the first day of school on a Tuesday? I couldn't exactly blame anyone who planned these things for the fact that the first didn't fall on a Monday, and I didn't, but it still seemed unnatural. Someone up there whose job was to map out dates on a high school's calendar year made the choice between the first of the week and the first of the month. Tough choice, I knew that. I would have chosen the Monday, but that would have left me all weird about starting the school year at the very end of August. The date-planner probably felt weirder about August than Tuesday, and I didn't blame them for that. You can't control what you feel weirder about.

Seven fifty a.m. on Tuesday, the first of September.

I wondered if the analog clock on the console might be a few minutes fast. I wondered if I'd have enough time to get to class before the first bell rang at eight. I wondered if ten minutes early was too early to be at school. I wondered if the big school building past the parking lot I sat in might have looked bigger than I remembered, which didn't make sense since the last time I'd seen the place was when I was eight and coming for a cousin's graduation. I wondered if I was making a big deal out of nothing, and deliberately uncurled my palms from the steering wheel and put them on my lap.

It was my first day of "real" school in five years. I couldn't blame myself for feeling weird about that.

Still seven fifty a.m. on Tuesday, the first of September. The digital display hadn't winked into the next minute since I'd last glanced at it. There was something lucky about that, wasn't there? Since time had frozen for just a little while as I'd worried over the engorged school, I could afford a few more minutes sitting there. I felt greedy for time alone in the car, and wanted to stall for just a few crumbs more of it… but that worry over being late was still there.

I forced myself out of the car my parents had bought me for driving to school and calculated how many things I didn't like about seven fifty-one a.m. on Tuesday, the first of September: the fact that it was Tuesday, the way the school loomed higher now that it did nine years ago, the possibility of being late to my first class, the dim gray clouds mottling the backdrop. Four. I yanked on the hem of my skirt where the pleats were crumpled halfway up my thigh; I didn't dislike the uniform, but so far the skirt became bunched up too high in the back whenever I stood up from a sitting position. Five. Charcoal gray skirt, silvery gray sky, dust gray building – it was the kind of color scheme they'd establish at a high school setting in a movie where all the teenagers get murdered. That was how they set up foreboding even in the beginning of the movie when everything was still normal and everyone was still alive – big bland skies and big dark buildings. I still wasn't sure how gray uniform skirts fit in to slasher flick cinematography, but I had a feeling it had to be related somehow. Audiences just loved those private school kids' uniforms all mussed up from chase scenes, or torn off from sex scenes, or blood-splashed from "Oh-my-god-he's-right-behind-us-and-the-best-friend-sidekick-is-definitely-getting-picked-off-right-now" scenes.

Crossing the street in front of the school and walking past the Arendelle Prep sign, I pictured myself running up those granite steps, bloodied and completely alone as the Final Girl in some Jason Voorhees prequel – significant gash on my forehead or cheek, navy blue stockings ripped from ankle to ass, powder blue blouse halfway or entirely untucked. There's a good chance I would be limping, too. And yeah, I'd be out of breath and crazed with the certainty that I was going to die, but it's not like I would actually die. The teenage girl always lives to the end of those movies. Especially if she's the new girl at school, and if she maybe hasn't got a lot of friends, and if she _definitely_ has never in her entire life gotten anywhere close to losing her vir–

Yeah, the school had definitely grown taller, wider. It was a perception thing, for sure – not like the building could have followed puberty with me and actually sprang up a few stories along with my inches, but as I lingered up the steps I could have sworn I felt the shudder of Arendelle Prep itself… yawning. I couldn't linger for long. A boy wearing a blazer – they were all wearing a blazer – held open the front door as I approached, and I quickly went inside.

This wouldn't be so bad as one of those movies. My parents wouldn't be paying all this money just to have me chopped up into pieces, right?

**. . .**

It could have been worse. As far as first mornings go, it could have been much worse. The whole school thing wasn't too hard since I'd done it before – even though it had been five years. I moved down the cafeteria line, sliding the dark green plastic tray along with me, and figured that if I'd never been to a school in my whole life, this part would be too much to handle. This lunchtime part. That wasn't saying much, though, since the locker part would have been too much, and the moving to different classrooms part would have been too much, and the finding where I left my locker part would have been too much, and the surrounded by strange kids part would have been too much, and the finding where I left my locker coming from _another_ entirely different hallway part would have been too much, if, you know… I'd been home-schooled my whole life. Instead of just the last big chunk of it.

I paid for the pre-packaged cobb salad and frozen yogurt I'd picked out – really, I could get used to this real school thing where you choose what you want for lunch – and wound through the river of gray and navy. Shoulders and knees – the different cuts and colors of hair up at eye level were the way that people could be picked apart as separate bodies. They were lanterns, head and hair lanterns bobbing on dark water that concealed a rocky streambed. It was a good thing I could swim. I snapped out of staring at the other kids and wove through to an empty table by the far wall. This swimming part, this lunchtime part, would have easily been the worst part for someone who had never been to real school. I could handle, though. I thought I was handling pretty well, considering… well, considering how much I disliked being around lots of other people.

I didn't fight my parents over this, though. They told me I was going to go to school this year – this was back in July, I remembered because the skin on my nose had been pink and peeling in thin little wisps from the Fourth of July cocktail mixer Dad had held for his campaign team out by the pool earlier that week – and it was strange because every stretch of my body went calm except the pink nosetip that pulsed a little bit, and I'd thought to myself, well, this is it.

And Mom had said, "Elsa, don't touch your sunburn." And I went back to my room on the third floor after that dinner, and I went into the bathroom and put on that aloe vera gel that felt like there was steam rising from my burn, and I put in the original _Nightmare on Elm Street_ and settled into a familiar scared that I welcomed like the old friend that it was.

But being around all these people, in the middle of all these new people, was something I could handle. I knew it. I knew it sitting in the dining room back that July with the news of real school on my plate, and I knew it sitting in the four desks I was assigned to in four rooms that morning, and I knew it sitting there at the round table in the cafeteria. This was only a school. This was only a school, one of thousands of schools that people my age went to because you had to go to a school unless you were homeschooled. They all had to be there. It wasn't a big deal. And maybe I didn't have to be there so much as I felt like I ended up there by chance, like all other signs pointed to me not being there, but really… these people all milling around were just kids who went to classes and fell into these little orbits that bumped into one another's.

I scanned the people at other tables while I ate my salad because I didn't have anything else to do. It wasn't so much an issue of no homework yet, either; I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen so many teenagers in one place. It was kind of fascinating. Not a lot of students were still in line, and everyone seemed to be settling into tables in groups of four, five, or six. Some hesitated. Some hugged a lot – mainly girls, the guys didn't hug – and made room for an addition to six or seven. Maybe they didn't see each other all summer. One table didn't have room for a girl that maybe they hadn't seen all summer, like really had _no_ room at all, not even to perch with her knees facing away from the table. I watched as she looked around for a minute and then dropped down into the table directly adjacent to her friends, facing them and turning back to her tray every few minutes or so to swipe what she was eating in a saucer of ranch dressing. The three other people at that table – two boys and a girl who hardly spoke to one another – kept glancing at the newcomer, but she didn't look at them once.

That big, full table was all girls. The one next to it was all boys, boys who focused on their food, and next to that one was another that was all boys, boys who focused on laughing a lot and on occasionally talking to the next table, one that was all girls, five or so girls who laughed at the boys who they must have known. I watched that last table for a few minutes longer than I watched the others – these girls ate much more slowly than everyone else, and smiled more slowly with good shoulders-back posture that I could recognize from all those years of etiquette lessons Mom had me take in the first floor parlor. As I was pulling my gaze around to find someone with bad hunched-over posture, probably to compare, something odd happened; one of the girls at that table, a girl with dark red hair, craned her neck to scan the cafeteria and then looked over at me at my table off over by the wall. I knew she was looking at me. She didn't look over at me again, but she cocked her head over in my direction and I saw her friends glance over my way.

I recognized that girl. I'd seen her not even fifteen minutes ago, in the hallway right before lunch. I'd found my way back from the senior hallway on the second floor to the main hallway by the front doors. I went to push through the doors and go leave for lunch, but they didn't budge. I tried again, perplexed. Why were they locked? Had I got mixed up and tried a different door from the one I came in?

A girl standing at the last locker watched me struggling. "What are you trying to do?"

I stopped pushing and looked over at her. "Leave? It's lunch period, right?"

The girl pushed a book into her locker. "We don't get off-campus lunch."

"Oh."

She finished putting away her books and shut her locker, turning to me. "Do you know where the cafeteria is?"

I glanced over at the white noise of other kids moving around lockers and friends in the hallway. "Yeah."

"Okay." The girl gave me a quick closed-mouth smile before walking off down the hall. I pushed off from the door, feeling slightly stupid, and took three wrong turns down emptying hallways before finding the cafeteria.

I was surprised I didn't recognize the first person who spoke to me at this school as soon as I started surveying her lunch table. Her vivid red hair was hard to miss. Her friends weren't glancing at me anymore, though, and neither was the girl herself, so I figured she was just telling them about some klutz new girl who'd made her laugh for all of five seconds and then moved on to talking about something else. Not really a big deal. It could have been worse.

Not really a big deal at all, but I couldn't get through the frozen yogurt without glancing back to that table of five or so girls with good posture. I couldn't help but watch a girl with strawberry blonde braids pointing the cherry tomato on the end of her fork at some girl across from her (all I could see was the short black hair back of her head). Who wore braids to high school?

Then I remembered that I wore my hair in a braid. I remembered the calm tingling-nosetip feeling from July for some reason, and I looked away, and then I threw out the rest of my frozen yogurt and left the cafeteria. It was five minutes until fifth period anyway.

**. . .**

The next day was the same as the first. For all the nerves I'd tried to squash about doing school, about how different and difficult it would be to adjust and feel like I could breathe there, there really wasn't much to it. It wasn't a whole lot different from how I remembered middle school being. Sure, the work was harder than it had been, but it made sense that senior English would be _Hamlet_ and not the same _To Kill a Mockingbird_ as in seventh grade (I thought about telling the teacher that the tutor at home had had me read _Hamlet_ – and _The Tempest_ – a year and a half ago, but I figured a little leg-up over the others in the class couldn't hurt, since after all, I'd never taken an honors class in my life). As for the other kids… well, I'd worried about that, about _them_, more than anything throughout July and August, but coming into Arendelle Prep had me realize that they were only a backdrop. Sure, as a moving, breathing backdrop they were more interesting to look at than walls, but they didn't pay attention to me and I didn't pay attention to them.

Well, maybe I paid attention to them. But it was in a movie way. Character assessment, right? This boy for example, near the back of the classroom, the costume department gave him floppy bangs, so since his eyes weren't easy to see he would end up near the second act either untrustworthy or hiding something. Probably both. I wondered what a teenage boy could possibly have to hide, but the thought was passing, and class started, and I forgot about it.

I went into the cafeteria again, and I bought a cobb salad again (though this time the frozen yogurt I chose was cherry vanilla rather than peach), and I threaded through the other tables to drop into the empty one at the far wall again. So far I found school to be rather monotonous. Wasn't an elite private school like this supposed to be more exciting? Wasn't it supposed to be full of more scandal? And wasn't it supposed to… well… wasn't it supposed to be giving me panic attacks?

"You know how you get," Mom had said two weeks ago, waving her finger in an indication for me to give her the three-sixty view of the new uniform she'd just brought home for me to try on. I'd spun, unsure of what to make of the blazer – Arendelle Prep's crest carefully sown onto the breast – or the skirt (was it really allowed to be this short?). The tie I liked, for some reason having always wanted an excuse to try one on.

"But they won't let you leave when you get overwhelmed by all of the other people." She had me turn the other direction. "You'll just have to find a way to handle it." When was the last time I'd been brought into Mom's east wing fitting room with something from the tailor's? Wasn't that for Dad's sponsorship gala in May, with the cream strapless gown that had chafed my underarms? I'd nodded along to what Mom was saying, not really listening as I kept turning clockwise, counter-clockwise, okay Elsa clockwise again, other way, no _that's_ not counter-clockwise, and caught myself in all the different mirrors.

_You know how you get._

I didn't really know, though, but I pretended I did. I'd have told Mom and Dad last night how well I did at school, how I didn't freak being around so many new people, but they'd been in Pittsburgh for a dinner. They'd probably be in Pittsburgh for another dinner tonight. Who even knew when they would or wouldn't be at a dinner in Pittsburgh, or Boston, or D.C.? I couldn't remember the last time I cared to guess.

"Uhh, 'scuse me."

I looked up sharply. There was a boy standing across from me on the other side of my table, looking at me with a cocked head and big brown eyes.

"Yes?" What did he want?

"Do you have fourth period English?"

"Yes." This was something I hadn't really prepared myself for. For some reason the possibility of anyone at this school talking to me of their own free will hadn't even crossed my mind.

The boy pulled out a book sandwiched in the stack under his arm. "I might be wrong, but I think this is yours." He held out a copy of _Hamlet_. I stared at the book in the boy's hand for a few seconds, not connecting the dots, and then automatically reached over the table to take it. It was a brand new paperback copy of the play that they'd handed out to the whole class, with a charcoal sketch of a skull printed on the front cover. I checked inside the cover – _Elsa Isberg_ was written there in light pencil. Erasable. Just in case they changed their minds and I had to give the book back.

I looked back up at the boy. "I left it behind, didn't I?"

He raised his eyebrows – they were very thick, and the motion changed his face. "Right there on the desk and you walked out without looking back. What's your name?"

He'd circled slowly around to the side of the table that faced out towards the rest of the cafeteria, the side closer to the wall where I sat. I followed his path curiously. "Elsa. You didn't look at this?" I pointed at the inside cover of the book where I'd written my name.

The boy planted a hand on the table and rested his weight on it. Through his open blazer I could see his left shirttail was untucked. "Finding you didn't take that much Nancy Drew work, I just recognized you from class. You're welcome."

He began to smile as he said this, but I still felt bad for not thanking him. So I did.

"No big deal," he said, and took the seat two away from mine. I wasn't sure if he was trying to give me space, and wasn't sure if I wanted or needed it, but I appreciated it just the same.

I cleared my throat. "So what's yours? Name, I mean." This was why I didn't go out in public. The first time someone struck up a conversation with me and I was fumbling all the cues.

"Ali." The boy, whose name was Ali, slid his hand over the table towards me, thumb facing the ceiling. I took the hand and shook, pleased to find that it was warm and extremely dry. I realized that this was the same boy with the floppy bangs that I did my character assessment on. I reassessed – the bangs meant boyish. Full of mischief.

"So you're new," he said. In no way was it a question.

"I'm not even going to fake surprise at being so obvious."

"Don't worry about it!" Ali looked away and glanced out over the other tables. "Good spot you picked, by the way, but I'll show you a better one." He turned back to me, blinking. "But no, don't worry. Mainly everyone just knows everyone else. New people are, well. New." He grinned at me, this time with teeth – this boy had a face made for smiling with teeth. Wow. It just lit him up. I couldn't help but smile back, curiously at ease. I still didn't know why this boy was talking to me, but I didn't mind it. So I took a deep breath.

"Any pointers for a newbie?"

Ali leaned back. "You're already on the right track. Keeping an open mind, that's a given. Asking _me_ what to do? You're set."

"I might as well graduate now."

He laughed; it was strange, I'd never felt like a very funny person before. "So you're a senior?"

"Yes."

Ali edged his chair a little bit closer to me and began to scan the other tables. I turned to follow his gaze. "Who have you met so far?"

"No one."

I thought he would look at me funny for that, but he kept his eyes moving outward. "Then who do you have in class?"

"Uh…" I roved over all the blazers. Eventually I snaked my finger up by my lip and pointed as discreetly as I could. "That table by the big windows with those guys. You see that one?"

"Yeah."

"They're in my Calculus class – the really big guy and the short one sitting next to him."

"Hmm." Ali rubbed his mouth. "Yeah, that's Ralph Wareck and Felix Fiske. They play a lot of Pokémon and stuff like that and don't really talk to anyone but each other. Who else?"

"Um. Okay, over there in the middle. All boys." I indicated with an upwards tilt of my chin.

"You must mean Shang."

"Maybe?"

Ali leaned in and nodded at the table. "You're taking Calculus and honors English, so I'm assuming you take all honors classes, and Shang Li is the only one of them that takes honors."

"Oh." I watched the serious-looking boy with a black buzz cut who I recognized from my classes. He leaned on his elbows and concentrated on his tray.

"There's not too much you need to know about Shang. He's a good guy. Kind of a pain in the ass if you do a group project with him, you know – doesn't usually think other people will do their part of the work, but prove him wrong and you're fine. Military family probably makes him a perfectionist like that."

I looked away from Shang over to the table of girls next to them. The good posture girls. The one with braids sat in the same place, but this time her friend with black hair was next to her; the other girl – who I now saw wore bright red lipstick, nodded while braid girl rolled her eyes and waved her fork. No cherry tomato this time.

"Who else do you recognize?" Ali said.

I wanted to ask Ali about the girl who conducted her speech with a fork, but I couldn't come up with a class I was sure he didn't have with me quick enough. "The table next to them?" I waited for him to nod. "That girl with red hair, we talked yesterday."

"You mean like, with _really_ fake red hair?" He scratched the shaggy black hair on the back of his head. "Ariel Triton. She does cheer with the rest of them."

"They're all cheerleaders?" I honestly didn't know what I thought about cheerleaders, having never met one before, but for some reason I assumed the cliquish nature of them was just contrived for characters onscreen. I mean, I knew they existed, and that as a general rule they might be pretty, but it hadn't occurred to me that they would actually all sit together at lunch like cheerleaders did in movies.

"Well, I think Ariel is on the swim team too, but yeah. That's about as broad as the horizons get for the rah rah group."

I watched the Ariel girl dab at her mouth with a napkin while watching another girl talk. She was watching braid girl, I noticed, and my eyes slid over to watch her too. I wondered if Ali was going to tell me about the others at that table.

"So when did you talk to _her_?" he said, raising those thick eyebrows of his at me.

I told him how this Ariel girl had put me out of my fruitless door-pulling misery. "I must have been trying to force that door for the better part of a minute."

Ali laughed, bright and full. "Geeze, that must have been embarrassing." I liked how he didn't pretend it wouldn't have been.

"Yeah, I wanted to drop out, but my mom wouldn't let me. So here I am."

He laughed again – and causing it still felt so alien to me – then gave me a good long look with the shadow of it quirking his mouth. "There are other ways. I'll show you."

"What, you mean like out of the school?"

"Well, duh." I couldn't remember the last time I'd been _duh'_ed. Logic told me I definitely had been in the past, since I'd been in school with other kids for six whole years. Upbringing told me to be offended by it, but I smiled in spite of myself. Ali continued, "I usually don't eat in here. And I know you don't really want to either." He was probably going off of my escape attempt from the day before.

I couldn't help but be curious, even though I didn't really want to break any rules at my new school. It couldn't hurt just to find out and satisfy my curiosity. Against my better judgment, I asked him. "How?"

But Ali just put one hand behind his head and inspected the fingernails on his other. "Said I'd show you, didn't I?"

"Fine, then show me."

Abruptly, Ali pushed off the chair and got to his feet. "So impatient!" He was laughing again, and whatever frustration I felt dissipated. I didn't know him, but I knew it was very hard to be mad at him.

"Listen," Ali went on, "Meet me at the water fountain in between the third floor bathrooms before lunch tomorrow."

I knew without even bothering to try to recall the third floor bathrooms that I'd get lost. "Why can't we just go from English together?"

He rolled his eyes. "Oh, just trust me. Your life is gonna be so dull without a little mystery in it."

I rolled mine right back. "Oh, just what I need. A little contrived hallway suspense to make my life worth living."

"That's the ticket!" Ali was already backing away towards the entrance, pointing his finger at me. "Remember the mystery!"

"Ooo-kay." I waved slowly as he disappeared through the doorway, then blinked, and he was gone. It was like he'd never been there to begin with. The blazers still moved around me and their chatter swirled and muttered around the high-ceilinged room. For the first time I noticed how old the architecture must be. This whole place was old. Old, polished wood and polished stone nearly everywhere you could touch your eyes or fingertips. I slowly trailed both my index fingers away from me on the well-oiled wood of the table's lip. Still the blazers moved around me, their owners talking to their friends and acquaintances and enemies in a seamless river of words that floated up and around towards the ceiling, the same way they had when I'd come in and started the lunch period today without a friend to my name.

I was ending the hour with a friend, wasn't I?

Briefly, I let a little smile tug at my lips. Gathering my sticky lunch scraps of plastic and paper onto my tray, I wiped my face clean of expression and went to toss the garbage in the bin by the entrance. Then I turned, walked back to my far-wall table, and grabbed the copy of _Hamlet_ that sat there.

**. . .**

To my great surprise, it only took me inwards of five minutes to find the third floor bathrooms the next day. I knew it took less than five because the second between-class bell hadn't rung yet by the time I trudged up to the water fountain, and we were given exactly five minutes between classes. Halfway into my third day I hadn't spoken to any other students than the one on my first day, Ariel, and the one on my second day, Ali, but I overheard enough to know that the other students at Arendelle found it to be far too little time to get to class.

"Hartz had my head this morning for being late." In the half minute before Calculus started I'd heard the boy in front of me talking to his friend. "I swear to god, I can't get anywhere on time with this bell schedule." He'd checked his watch, as though reassuring himself that he wasn't late again, and I'd caught sight of protruding front teeth with lime green brackets worrying his lower lip.

"Dude, you need to relax," his blonde friend had said lazily, and that was that. I didn't feel like it was too little time, since the school wasn't all that big and I hadn't had any trouble making it to class yet with any less than a full minute to spare, but then again I didn't spend any of those five minutes catching up with anyone at the lockers. Most everyone in the senior hallway up on the second floor did that. I didn't see the fork-pointing girl in that hallway in between any of my classes, though, or her red-haired friend Ariel (she was on the first floor by the door, I remembered that eventually). I figured they must have been younger – juniors or sophomores. Were juniors, even sophomores, on the same cheerleading squad as the seniors? Were the other cheerleaders at that lunch table seniors, or was the squad all mixed-year based on talent? I hadn't the slightest clue how it worked, figuring I couldn't go off movies since they would probably change around the rules to suit the plot. Curious, I kept my eyes peeled for the girl with the black bob (she was the only other one from that table who I remembered), but after a few seconds of scanning around all the different heads of hair mixing around the narrow hallway, I realized that I couldn't search for a specific person without looking like I was searching for a specific person, and I ended up turning back to the books in my locker. The only face I recognized at the lockers in the senior hallway was Shang, but he was easy to pick out since I had most of my classes with him. I didn't see Ali. He must have been a junior too.

I bent down over the water fountain and took my third quick sip in the past minute. The bell had just rung, and the hallway – no lockers, just classrooms – was almost empty but for a few stragglers swimming by. I twisted the knob – it was an older dark-metal fountain, with a knob instead of a push panel – and felt the gloves I wore today slip on the spindles.

A slither of dull pain echoed in the skin of my fingers. I froze, counted to five, and then used the heel of my hand to press the knob far enough forward that a trickle of water burbled from the fountain's spout. The gloves were a pain to wear at school – no one else wore gloves. But the creamy suede was the same exact navy color as the blazer, so I figured they blended in pretty well. At least, I hoped they did. It's not like anyone looked at me – my hands, my face – in the first place.

That day two weeks ago in Mom's fitting room, when I'd tried on the uniform for the first time, I had stepped down from the short wooden platform in the middle of the mirrors, tugging at the hem of the skirt (I still hadn't got used to keeping it from bunching yet). That was when I'd caught sight of the blue gloves sitting folded on top of the uniform parcels. I'd shot Mom a glance that was not quite a question. I couldn't hear the tight-lipped sigh, but had recognized the flare of her nostrils.

"None of your others would match," she'd said, as though that was all there was to say. I wanted to look at the floor and say something in my defense, something to change her mind, but it wasn't like I hadn't had to pull on the white lace pair not even six weeks before. It was logical to have had new ones made for the new uniform.

"True." I'd shrugged, contemplating the new blue gloves as though I was simply assessing the correctness of the color.

Half a minute of silence passed. "Let's hope you don't have to use them," Mom had said, rubbing her elbow gently. Then she'd turned toward the door. "It fits well, doesn't it? I'll let you get changed."

In the second floor hallway on my third day of school, standing between the MEN's and the WOMEN's bathrooms with my lower back pressed into the water fountain, I gazed across the hall at a dark wooden doorjamb, not really looking at the doorjamb, and ran the first three suede fingertips of my right hand up and down the suede palm of my left hand. All I did was watch _Zombieland_ last night. I'd watched it a dozen times before. _Up. Down_. And I couldn't control or even begin to explain how Emma Stone looked… what did she even look like that was different? Who did she look like but her regular self? I didn't know. _Up again. Down again_. There was the faintest velvety sliding noise as the suede brushed against suede.

I hated having to wear the gloves, but the gloves themselves I rather liked. These, and the rest of them. The black matte leather, and the feathery tan kidskin, and the white lace, powder blue lace, and mint green lace that had all come in one box together, and the deep red-wine suede, and the close-knit eggshell satin, and all the others. They were all soft. They kissed my skin, bathed and soothed it.

They were warm.

"So how lost did you get?"

I shoved my hands behind my back and looked up to see Ali approaching from near the main staircase.

"I'm still lost," I said automatically. "I'm not on the third floor, am I?"

The boy grinned as he came closer; it was still as contagious as it had been the day before. I was glad for it. "You're in the basement, klutz." He walked right past me, and since he didn't turn into the MEN's restroom, I took it as my cue to follow and fell in step with him. "It's seventh period by now. How long have you been standing here in this supply closet?"

I stretched my legs longer and faster to keep up with Ali. "Couple hours. I got confused."

He led me into and up a narrow staircase on the far end of the hallway. His gray slacks jogged up the stairs above me. "Well, you smell great," he called over his shoulder. "Really loving the _Eau de Pine Sol_."

"Your French is great," I said as we reached a landing and crossed into another hall-end staircase; I meant it, too, just from his accent on a few short words. But I wasn't sure if I should do any more than joke with Ali in this friendship yet, so I said it like I was teasing.

"_Merci, mademoiselle, mais la grâce va au bon Professeur Lumière_."

I could understand what he said well enough from two and a half years of French tutoring, but I concentrated more on tasting the ease with which he said it. For some reason, a well-spoken foreign language always made me hungry. When the words rolled from Ali's mouth, it tasted like… soft bread. With butter.

"Okay, will you need a leg up?"

"Hm?" I shook my head out of its thoughts of bread-words and took stock of Ali, right in front of me, hanging languidly with one arm and one leg off the second rung of a floor-to-ceiling ladder. Ladder?

"No," I said reflexively. "Does this go to the roof?" I hadn't even been paying much attention to our journey upwards. How many floors had we ascended? Two? Ten? I looked around the small ladder-room, its smudged but clear sunny windows and its short ceiling. It was a brief climb up to the hatch door. I wasn't scared of climbing ladders, or of roofs. If I really was being led to a roof. Still, this was happening very fast.

It was only my third day at real school, after all.

Ali must have noticed me blink once, twice in a row up at the hatch. He mashed his lips together and used his body weight to swing around directly in front of me. God, did it look effortless. How did he do that so fluidly?

"You've just gotta trust me," he said, those brown eyes bright and wide pointed down at me. "You do, right?" And with that, the corner of his mouth quirked into a smile. Like before, it lit up his whole face with an enthusiasm that said, _I'm excited. I want you to be excited about the same thing_. I liked that he didn't feel too cool to show excitement, and that he didn't only want it for himself.

And I didn't really – trust him that is, at least not entirely, but there was nothing wrong with that. I'd known him a day. It's not like I _mis_trusted him. It's just not like I had to trust a person immediately within the first twenty-four hours of knowing them in order to ever trust them in the future. I knew that I could, that I absolutely would eventually, and that was enough for me. "Sure," I said, "Why not," and without even thinking about it slipped a gloved hand out from behind my back and gripped the rung at Ali's hip-level.

He glanced at my hand. "Nice gloves," was all he said, before he swung back around and climbed up through the hatch without a backward look. I looked at the place where the suede fingers curled around the smoothed-rust rung for just a second before squeezing tighter, gritting my molars through the slow blossom of pink pain in my fingers, and following close behind.

I pushed through the hatch, and god, it was _definitely_ the roof. I hoisted myself up and out of the person-sized wooden square in no hurry, forgetting Ali for just a split second, because _yeah_, this was the roof, and I had never been on a roof before. I'd have thought I had never looked at treetops before.

"What do you think?"

I looked up at Ali and his extended hand, there to help me to my feet. I ignored the hand and stood, slowly but as gracefully as I could manage; I wanted these first few seconds to be mine.

"This is so… cool." I edged closer to the short brick wall nearest to me. It faced another roof, the top of another building – maybe the cafeteria – and beyond that was the tree-lined lane that led from the road into the Arendelle parking lot. Looking at it from this angle, it seemed like I had never driven my car down that path in my entire life. Ali smiled to himself, shoved his hands in his pockets, and looked out over the playing fields behind the school to the east. It really was breathtaking. I hated to be such a geek about nice scenery, but something about big open skies always put a strange helpless thrill at the top of my throat. The sun unashamed of touching my skin, the wind playing through my stray hairs and the open-mouthed sleeves of my blazer… This was what Emerson talked about. Man, nature, man and nature, and all that. Looking out over the tops of all the outside parts of this school, I almost felt like I _went_ there. Like I was supposed to be there with all the necktie-kids who called this place second home.

After a minute or so I noticed Ali turn towards me.

"You didn't bring any lunch, did you?" He had one of his eyebrows raised, smiling so I knew he was amused. I preferred it that way, knowing he was amused with me rather than concerned. I didn't have to worry about making him worry. It was nice and new.

"Forgot," I said with a shrug.

"That's fine," Ali said, starting to walk around the other side of a taller rooftop wall. "I'll make Kristoff give you something, he always brings enough for a moose to share anyway."

"Who?"

"Kristoff." I trailed behind, ducking around the corner, and found Ali standing on the other side of the wall with his head cocked towards a boy, a blondish boy sitting hunched over on a ledge. The boy raised his eyebrows.

"Uh, me?"

Ali hopped up next to the boy – and maybe _boy_ was the wrong way to think of someone so big – and unfurled the brown bag in his lap. I hadn't even noticed him bring it up with him. Maybe this Kristoff had brought it.

"This is Elsa," Ali said. "Brand new at Arendelle."

The other boy peered into his own bag. "Nice." He glanced up at me briefly. "I'm Kristoff."

"It's nice to meet you." I slowly came closer, watching the two boys talk for a few minutes, eventually leaning my shoulder against the wall directly across from them. They unwrapped sandwiches and fell into an eating silence for a few minutes – I was engrossed in all I had to look out at and didn't mind.

"So," Kristoff finally said to Ali. "I ran into that guy you hate yesterday."

Ali leaned back on the palm of his hand and rolled his eyes. "And?"

"And he threw his jockstrap at me." Kristoff sounded bored.

"So what, you were just walking down the hallway and he was like, 'Hey buddy, catch'?"

"More like I was out by the team entrance to the field and they were finishing practice."

"Did it smell really gross?"

"What the fuck is wrong with you?"

By this point I was having trouble following along. "Who do you hate?" I said. Kristoff took a bite of his sandwich and Ali sighed.

"Just this two-faced asshole new guy."

"The teachers like him better," Kristoff added, enunciating carefully around a full mouth while his eyes were still on his sandwich.

"New guy?" I asked.

"Not new like you," Ali said. "New like last semester. And the teachers do not like him better."

"Then why do you hate him?" I felt like I was missing something.

Ali heaved an even bigger sigh (seriously, this boy was getting to be a drama queen). "Okay, so… Here, come with me." He hopped off the ledge he'd been sitting on and wove off back towards the hatch we'd come in through. I shot a glance at Kristoff, but he didn't move from his perch or even look up, so I went after Ali. He bent over the short ledge I'd first looked out over towards the lane, facing a wide stretch of slanted glass panels. "Okay, see down there?"

I realized, now that I was being told to look at it, that this was a ceiling window, and I realized now that I was making an effort to let my eyes adjust, that this ceiling window overlooked the cafeteria. It looked completely alien to me now – it was hard to believe I'd sat in there two days in a row. I couldn't even pick out where my empty side table was.

"That table where Shang is sitting," Ali went on. I knew that table. I knew where it was, or at least would know where it was if I was at ground level, but for some reason finding anything familiar from the clear, windy outside looking in was near impossible. Eventually I focused on the middle of the large room and found the cluster of faces I'd been paying most attention to over the past few days. The bright red spot of that girl Ariel's hair definitely helped.

"Yeah."

"Okay, well that's him there across from Shang. Not the dark hair, but the one next to him. Patchy sideburns, you see him?"

"Yeah."

"That's Hans." Squinting down through the sun-spotted greenish glass, I could see down to the cafeteria tables surprisingly well. The boy Ali had indicated, sandwiched between two other boys with darker hair, sat back with both hands laced behind his head. There was something pricking me that I couldn't place with him, same as with the girl with the braids, but with this boy it was different. I got the more concrete feeling that I knew him from somewhere.

"And yeah," Ali went on as though right in the middle of another conversation, "maybe it is a teacher thing, but you don't even have to have a class with him. Just talk to him, and then you hear how he acts around his friends, like the way he talks about his girlfriend when she's not around. I swear, I've never met such a spoiled, selfish, entitled trustfund mayor's kid who-"

_Mayor's kid_. It hit me with a jolt, distracting me from the rest of Ali's rant. Hans. Hans _Westerguard_.

. . .

"Mayor Westerguard's son, Hans," Dad said. With one hand on my shoulderblade and the other palm-up between me and the boy smiling tall in front of me, Dad turned from me to him and squinted into the bright sun while he put on a symmetrical grin.

"Nice to meet you, Elsa." The boy wore thick sideburns, a white tee shirt under his tucked-in gray button-up, and a politician's kid's smile, and still he wasn't sweating. Not a single bead glistening at his hairline or the hollow of his throat. He and I had that in common – not the sideburns, but the easy surreally-dry skin. For my part, the part of the daughter rather than the son, I wore a three-quarter sleeved blue floral that cinched tight at the waist and went down to my knees; it was pretty, but it was more form-fitting than I liked to wear in sticky July, and with the vivid red petal prints it was more colorful than I really liked to wear _ever_, but Mom had said it was "in keeping with the theme" and suited my figure well, so I was wearing it. I should have been sweating more – knew biology well enough to know when a person should be reacting to an eighty-seven degree poolside sun and getting drenched in themselves – but I was lucky.

I was lucky to be out, around so many people. I never knew anyone at these parties, never knew what to say to anyone at these parties, but I was always glad to get to see who they were, just for a few hours. To see that they were real.

The tall boy, Hans, had put out his hand, and I had shaken it, and his own dad – standing on his right side with a hand to shoulder in a diagonal mirror of my Dad – gave the boy's shoulder's two short pats.

"Elsa," the Mayor said, "Am I remembering correctly that you'll be graduating this next year too?" He must have remembered my age from meeting me two or three times before, here at the house at some kind of dinner or cocktail night; I remembered his long arrow-shaped nose and the rich gray-canoe mustache tipped upside down underneath it, and knew I had met him. Somewhere deep down where I knew that I was supposed to do so, I flushed with the contented delight that I had met the Mayor enough times that he knew who I was.

Before I could open my mouth and reply, Dad pointed his chin at me. "Yes, she and Hans are the same year."

Year, as in year in school? As in starting on the fifth year in a row taking lessons two staircases down from my bedroom? No, this Hans Westerguard probably wasn't in the same _same_ year. But I pushed up the corners of my mouth and nodded anyway.

Hans, Hans with the dark reddish sideburns and the two layers that didn't make him sweat, looked at his dad and then smiled at me. In the lull, this was the part in the movie where some kid – _who invited the kid? who cared_ – would jump in the pool with a nice atmospheric, summer-sounding splash. _This sets the scene so well_, the director says, _for a Fourth of July scene_. You've gotta have that kid splash in the pool.

But nobody splashed, and Dad's grip tightened on my shoulder the way I saw Mayor Westerguard's grip tighten on Hans's while they talked in convincingly light tones about the Senate elections in April. It was like they were pretending they weren't going to be going up against one another. It was disconcertingly false. But rather than be disconcerted, and rather than really care if that boy Hans's shoulder tendons chafed any worse than mine did, I cast my eyes around the poolside for Mom, or for anything else, really. I couldn't find Mom (I wasn't looking all that hard, honestly), but over on the longer north side of the pool there was Dad's chief campaign manager Helen, Helen Park, Helen Something (what was it?), laughing with her head thrown back further than I'd ever seen it at something another team member, Lucius, was saying over the rim of a yellow margarita. I was glad to see Helen laugh at a party like she wasn't at a party to be at work. And my gaze traveled over to Helen's two kids on their wooden deck chairs, wearing clothes that were nice enough for a parent's boss's party but loose enough to have swimsuits on underneath – a string there, through the black-haired girl's billowy red dress. They looked bored, but the woman with them – platinum blonde, and maybe a nanny since she was only paying attention to the kids when no one paid attention to the kids at these things – she was trying to talk to them. She cocked her head at the pool; she was trying to get them to swim. The younger kid, the blonde boy, said something to her, and the nanny gave a catlike smile and peeled off her shirt just as easy as you'd like.

I looked away, and for some reason my eyes went straight to Hans, but his only flickered to mine for a quick, passing moment before moving on. I couldn't look at Dad, but didn't he notice? Wasn't it abnormal and out of place? For someone to strip down to a swimsuit right next to a pool, at an eighty-seven degree Fourth of July party whose invitation read "Please Bring a Bathing Suit"?

My gaze tore back to the woman with Helen Something's kids, and now it was just a black bikini on her goldenish skin as she stood from her deck chair. No one else was staring, and I didn't know why. The blonde boy got to his feet too, laughing, and the nanny turned to the ladder, extending a toe towards the water. That toe towards the water that meant calf and thigh and belly and everything that followed in the water.

"Excuse me a minute, Dad?" I looked up at Dad with a quick closed-mouth smile, told Mayor Westerguard and his son Hans that it was nice to see him again and nice to meet him, respectively, and went off through the clusters of nice people back to the house.

The front arm sides of my shoulders felt a little trembly while I toted a silver serving tray of ice cubes up to the third floor, but otherwise my body felt calm. Blood hummed only very quietly next to my ears. All that the skin around my thighs did was quiver around the bone; it wouldn't fall off. No, this I was used to. I'd long since composed a routine. I heaved the tray, the oblong silver scallop tray of ice, up on to my bedroom-adjacent bathroom sink. I pointed my nose at the ceiling – I wouldn't notice the burn on the tip until the next day – and blinked back the way that I couldn't so easily close my mouth with my neck all taut like it was, gripping the tray's now cold handles.

"_You might still have those unnatural thoughts when you leave Compass. That's normal. You're starting a very slow and very long journey into young adulthood, and we know it's impossible to be perfect. But by now you've learned the ways that work best for you to keep those thoughts away when they get especially bad." _

I plunged my hands into the ice.


	2. Chapter 2

_**A/N**: Not sure if anyone caught my "error" in the last chapter where I wrote that Senate elections are in April rather than November, but I did that on purpose for the sake of the story's plot. I hope that doesn't bother anyone too badly! Anyway, here's chapter two. Please leave feedback!_

**. . .**

The Saturday at the end of that week was a peculiar day for me. All week I'd gone to school, adjusting to my immersion in the routine at Arendelle Prep, but after those first four days it was back home. It was back to the familiar yawning hallways and echoing parquet floors, to the old routine of seeing no one for hours.

I relaxed, in a way. It was familiar. It was home.

It's not that I saw absolutely _no_ one, though. True, I spent most of my free time shut in my room, sifting through stacks of newly-arrived Netflix envelopes, but if I ventured down to the ground floor kitchens for lunch I would inevitably run into Louis, the cook. Louis had a wide, sour overripe-tomato face and didn't particularly like me, but Louis didn't particularly like anyone and I didn't take it personally. If I cut across the lawn over to the garages, I could find Jim, the driver; Jim was relatively young, but he smoked a lot of cigarettes and didn't like conversation. A few times the summer before last when he'd been recently hired, I'd gone out to the garages and kicked around the oily-smelling floors, asking sparse questions about the greasy engines he'd been tooling around with whenever I'd wandered in. He'd answered all my questions noncommittally enough, knit brow pointed steadily at what was under the hood, until a few days in when I'd ventured to ask if I could lend a hand with whatever he was doing. Jim had paused and frowned over at me then, making real, steady eye contact with me for the first time.

"You'd get those dirty," he said shortly, shooting a deliberate glance at the white wrist-length kidskin gloves curling and bunching into themselves at my sides. He'd then turned back to the motor like I wasn't there, lank brown hair falling curtain into his eyes, and I'd turned and headed back to the house.

I'd never faulted Jim for not wanting to entertain a fifteen year old girl, but for the longest time after that I couldn't help but wonder if he _knew_. Not just him, necessarily, but all the staff – Jim, Louis, Gerda, Kai, Wally… was there any way they wouldn't know? Any way that the story of what had happened to the Senator's daughter, what she had _done_, could stay under wraps even within the house's walls? I couldn't guess. I wanted to believe that it could be so, but even so I had to recall Gerda riding next to me on the long drive to Compass, because Mom was "running a fever" that morning. The same as all of the mornings in the preceding weeks.

Sometimes I browsed and turned over ideas of Dad having his lawyer type up non-disclosure forms. _Sign here and you swear not to clock out and go tell any journalists/reporters/wives/children/diaries that my daughter went to ex-gay camp_, it would say. _Don't forget the date on the line right there_.

I'd learned to choose my battles a long time ago. If Dad really did have staff sign forms like that – and I'd bet every cent in the bank that he did – then at least no one outside the house knew anything about me. No one at Arendelle knew. It all stayed cloistered here, at home – rattling off the windowpanes and pinballing around corners in the early months, then stretching out and curling up in patches of sunlight later on. Somehow, over the years the secret had settled down and made itself quietly at home, like a pet. We'd declawed it, trained it to be docile. It obeyed.

It had learned "the ways that worked best." One of the many variations of "The Way".

A curt knock at my bedroom door yanked me out of thoughts of Compass. It couldn't have been more welcome. "Come in," I called from my bed, shifting my lying-down weight from one elbow to the other.

The door opened with a soft click, and as I looked up from the DVDs I was sorting (a slew of orders keeping in a satire slasher theme), I was surprised not to see Gerda on the other side, but -

"Dad!"

Tall and trim there in the doorway, Dad looked exactly the same as he had nearly a week ago when I'd seen him last. He always came back as though he'd never left. He eased into my room slowly, as he always did – in a very masculine way, he seemed to regard with some ginger curiosity the personal space of a teenage girl. A tight smile neatly creased his long face as he stopped a few paces from the bed and observed the debris of my movie marathon scattered in front of me. "Busy day, I see."

I tilted my head up. "How was Pittsburgh?"

He turned to the blue tortoise shell vase of paperwhites on my dresser and touched his fingers along a few petals. "Oh, Pittsburgh was Pittsburgh. It rained three nights in a row and your mother bothered me incessantly about my shoes."

"Not well enough waterproofed?" I felt my eyebrows rise, all too familiar with my mother's cold and chill precautions. They could be a little… intense.

"No, not nearly." The crow's feet around Dad's eyes pinched in a quick flash of amusement – there then gone. He went on, "Senator Wiggins hosted what shaped up to be a wonderful series of dinners, though, regardless of the weather."

"Were there a lot of guests?"

"In my estimation, perhaps too many." Pursing his lips thoughtfully, Dad turned his attention to the cluster of smallish trophies that sat next to the paperwhites. "Although I suppose I'm just not well-adjusted to the idea of overcrowding a guest list with so many of our far left-leaning contemporaries. With people like Chris Cuzco a few seats away, it's hard not to feel cramped."

I caught the tightly clipped edge in Dad's voice. Arizona governor Chris Cuzco was easy to remember; I'd never met him before, but the young governor had been making national headlines recently for his aggressively vocal support for the same sex marriage push in Arizona. And because of this, I'd gotten to hear quite a bit of what Dad thought of him over the past few months. "He must have traveled a long way," I said lightly, unsure of what else to respond with.

But Dad didn't go into the topic of Chris Cuzco, to my relief. Instead, he continued to browse the trophies on the dresser.

"Do you miss it?" he said, eyes on the placards. I knew the words he read from over where I lay on the bed. _Junior Figure Skating – Sectionals – First Place. Junior Figure Skating – Regionals – First Place. All-District Skate Finals – First Place. Seasonal Ice Showcase – Junior Division Skating – First Place. _Et cetera, et cetera. I had them memorized.

"Yes," I said simply. I watched him in the following moments of silence, trying to gauge a reaction. There was none, other than an expressionless nod. What was he thinking about? He'd be thinking about my skating as what started it all. It wouldn't be the competitions, awards, or seven years of biweekly lessons. He wouldn't think of my name in the newspaper at ten, two years before his was ever a daily fixture, when the memory instantly, instinctively associated with _Elsa skating_ was _Elsa kissing another girl_.

It could have happened at the park and I'd have been forbidden to ever walk on grass again.

I could separate and isolate the incident much more easily, though, but that was thanks to Compass. Compass, and "The Way"; they had _ways_ of teaching you paths (it was all about "Ways" and "Paths"), and they weren't just the Life Paths, or the Duty Paths, but also the Mindfulness Paths. They worked with you to teach your mind the right roads to travel. It was almost fascinating, the way they did it.

The lead therapist for the First Steps unit (ages eleven to fourteen) was Gene, a large V-shaped man named Gene with expressive thick hands and interested eyes that twinkled when he leaned in to listen.

"Where did it happen?" he'd ask, leaning in to listen elbows-on-knees. He could have you think it was his favorite bedtime story, the way he said it.

"At the ice rink."

"Did you know her?"

"No."

"How did you meet?"

"She's in the beginner's skating class. The teacher asked me to help."

"What's-"

"It was my second time."

"What's her name?"

"Mrs. Radcliffe."

"And what's the girl's name?"

"Oh. I um… I don't remember. I only met her the one time."

"What did she say to you?"

"That she liked my demonstration. She, uh. She said I looked like the queen of the ice out there."

"What did you say?"

"I said I could help her practice if she wanted."

"And what did she say?"

"That she would be happy just watching me skate instead."

"Then what did you say?"

"I didn't… say anything else."

"Why did you kiss her?"

"I don't know."

"Try to concentrate. Why did you kiss her?"

"Because she held my hand."

"Why else did you kiss her?"

"Because she was so prett-"

_TSRRRRRRRRRRRT. _

Gene would never even blink when he'd hit the alarm – a rattling, deafening, cruel fire-alarm buzzer that erupted from a metal grate in the floor directly beneath my chair.

"What did kissing her feel like?"

"…Warm. Also really soft, and w-"

_TSRRRRRRRRRRRT_.

"What did you like about her?

…Elsa. You can do this. What did you like about her?"

"She reminded me of the su-"

_TSRRRRRRRRRRRT._

Individual therapy with Gene was four times a week over those six months. After a while, I could hardly even recall anything about that girl's face. I knew the story well, but the details had faded out, leaving the entire scene a fiction. Gene and the others at Compass had led my mind off to another path, one that avoided the mistake. I'd never been able to find my way back.

It was funny, though; after all of the buzzers in Gene's office (I'd read about "operant conditioning" in a book about B.F. Skinner years later), _he_ I remembered as clearly as anything. I could still remember my first time meeting him like it was yesterday – when he'd drove all the way out to the house for a pre-placement visit.

"Stupendous to meet you," he'd said to me there in the foyer, leaning down to grin wide and shake my hand nearer to eye level; I could even remember his hot, full breath reaching my cheeks. "I'm Gene from Compass International. You know, I think you and I are going to be good friends."

I'd never had a friend anything quite like him.

Dad finally turned from the skating trophies on my dresser. "You were pretty good, weren't you?" I sewed on a smile in response as he walked nearer to the bed; I _was_ good. I'd been exceptionally good. But that wasn't important anymore, not really. So I didn't say anything. It's not like Dad's question really required an answer.

"How was your first week at Arendelle?"

He asked as casually as though I'd just transferred this year from some other high school, and it caught me off guard. Maybe it had slipped his mind that I'd been home schooled here all this time, that this was about as new as a trip to the moon for me. But who was to say he was the mistaken one? Maybe I'd been enrolled and attending Roosevelt High all this time, and Compass had scrambled my head up so much that I couldn't remember. Maybe I'd never even gone to Compass – this was all a long coma from slipping at the rink and hitting my head.

But that couldn't be, because I was too good to ever slip.

"Great," I replied. "I really like it a lot." I glanced down and silently thanked every higher power that by today my hands were completely back to normal and glove-free.

The corners of Dad's mouth curved up in a small smile; I always liked to watch how his thinly-trimmed mustache mirrored the shape of the mouth below it. It seemed more flexible, more moveable, than a big bushy mustache like the one Mayor Westerguard wore. Mayor Westerguard could have been nearly twenty years older than Dad, though. Mustache thickness was quite possibly an age thing; more months, more hairs. Having never had a mustache myself, I could only guess.

"Are you at the top of your class yet?"

"Well, duh," I said – not even thinking. The word had slipped out, sliding down on my tongue through the trapdoor that had kept it where Ali had deposited it. I instantly felt like I'd snuck something forbidden into the house. I caught my breath and waited for Dad's reaction, but it seemed he hadn't even listened for the response to his question. He now bent in over the pile of Netflix envelopes on my bed.

"Are these all new?"

"Yes."

Dad glanced up at me from under a severe brow.

"They just came in the mail today," I said quickly. No response. "You and Mom weren't back yet." Still nothing. "I haven't watched anything. I was waiting for you."

I absently ran a hand down the length of my braid, pulling it over my shoulder and toying with the end as Dad began to pick through the DVDs. He and Mom had their conditions for allowing me such extensive access to so many movies; movies were what I'd come to do with so much of my time here, and though I was greedy for how much more I might watch with a TV that _streamed_ Netflix, I understood that that kind of access didn't cooperate with Mom and Dad's conditions.

Dad went through the envelopes (including _Shaun of the Dead_, _Scream 1_ through _3_, _Scream 4_ for good measure even though I was skeptical, _Rapture-Palooza_, etc.), looking over the titles and disc art with a thoughtful tilt of his head. Like with everything else he did, he moved with a meticulous, almost dainty deliberateness that never failed to make me very slightly fidgety.

Eventually he paused at a disc; he pulled it from the pile, his eyebrows crept up his forehead, and my heart sank.

"I'll have to take this one," he said, standing from the bed with the envelope in his hand. Frowning, he showed me the big-breasted, half-clothed cheerleader on the disc: _Jennifer's Body_.

"I'm sorry," I said uselessly. What was I supposed to say when this happened? Give an excuse, some explanation? _I wasn't trying to sneak something past you? I didn't know? Won't happen again? _It didn't make any difference; Dad still had to take the movie away, and I still felt awful. My limbs sizzled and tingled with guilt as though I'd been lying funny on all of them at once; it was a similar can't-move-can't-stay-still feeling, as I stayed lying on the bed where I was and Dad moved towards the door. _I'm sorry you always have to make sure I'm not being bad?_

"I know you do your best," Dad said simply. He lingered in the doorway, holding the DVD to his chest; he must have caught something in my expression. With the idea of that expression maybe being on my face, I pressed everything I felt into one lump, kneaded it into a ball, and put it away in my inside oven to harden. I was fine. See? Nothing to worry about.

"See you at dinner?" I gave him my calmest, best well-behaved-daughter smile. There was a way, I knew, that I'd perfected poised and graceful, and that was something that made him happy. That was something good that I could give him. I couldn't _be_ good, but at least I could be perfect. That was something that he could be proud of me for.

"Yes, I'll see you then." Dad pressed his lips together in some kind of brief smile. "Enjoy your movies."

Starting in to _Scream_ a few minutes later, I found that I felt like I'd never been to Arendelle Prep at all last week. I must have been alone in this house the whole time.

**. . .**

By Tuesday, I could find my locker in the senior hallway with relative ease. I counted that as a victory. Considering the frequency with which I found myself backtracking and turning circles in this school, I celebrated my victories whenever I could score them.

I'd embarrassed myself enough times in my first week. Some of it had to do with home-schooled-kid naiveté – there was the front door incident with that Ariel Triton girl on my first day, and also the Pledge of Allegiance. I'd realized after three mornings that I didn't remember past the second half, past "the United States of America." I'd ended up just giving up, resigning myself since then to silently looking out the window with my palm on my breastbone while the other students recited. How did someone even forget the Pledge of Allegiance? I thought it was just something that stuck with you. Was I really just that spectacular at forgetting things? Would it have helped for me to have been practicing these past five years? Had I forgotten to do that too?

Then there was the embarrassment I brought on myself all of my own accord on Friday afternoon. I'd met with Ali and Kristoff again on the roof during lunch hour, and while the boys ate I'd looked over at the bigger boy; next thing I knew I'd blurted out, "Where's your uniform?" I hadn't even noticed his jeans and Carhartt boots the first time I'd met him.

He just stared at me. "I don't go to school here."

"Oh."

I must have asked a lot of unusual (or probably just plain stupid) questions, because Kristoff tended to stare when I spoke to him. It was definitely a "Did you really just ask that?" stare, too; there was no confusing it with the stare-of-infatuation – I'd been hyper vigilant for it on Ali's face, from the first day he'd begun to pay so much friendly attention to me, but to my relief he read easily as nothing but friendly (I wasn't completely clueless about that _look_, despite my years of near-recluse status; the events hosted at home once Dad had got high into politics were my few-and-far-between opportunities to shine for the public eye, and as I was known exclusively as Senator Isberg's "extremely delicate, charmingly quiet daughter", every now and then a few sons, brothers, or nephews were brought to these events to keep me company).

After my brilliantly articulate "oh", Ali had jumped in and told me that Kristoff actually worked at Arendelle, as a groundskeeper and custodian.

"How old are you?" I'd asked next. Maybe I shouldn't have asked him so many questions. No one who worked at my house ever really talked to me (not for lack of me trying), so I wasn't sure how tact was supposed to work around these kinds of things.

"Nineteen," Kristoff had said. After a pause, he added, "I did graduate from high school. I went to Roosevelt."

"I never assumed you didn't," I said.

"Why are you wearing those gloves?" he'd then asked by way of response, leaning towards me with a pinched brow. I had noticed Ali, perched on a higher ledge behind Kristoff, perk up with well-concealed interest.

Frowning at the abruptness of the question, I'd told them that I got sick easily, and that that was why I'd been home schooled for so long. My hands had hung casually at my sides as the words rolled out smoothly. I'd never been asked by or had to answer someone who really didn't know (as opposed to the way Mom and Dad sometimes had me explain myself as a kind of contrition), but I was always ready for when the question might come, and the response was very well rehearsed. Towards the end of the lunch hour, after the conversation had wound around to all sorts of different things (I'd even participated some), my gloved hands had gradually crept up and met each other under my right rib, twisting and softly worrying one another. The soft insides of his wrists resting loosely on his knees, Kristoff had spoken to me again then;

"I'm sorry about before," he'd said. "You know…" He up-nodded at my hands. "Some kids who go here just kind of look down on me, assume I'm stupid or something. Since I'm close to their age and I have… this job."

I'd thought for a moment. Finally, I simply said, "You don't work for them." Kristoff had smiled at that, and Ali had cracked a joke about family bonding before nearly slipping off his ledge, and on Monday the "Did you really just ask that?" stares had disappeared.

Today, I counted that as one of my small victories. Popping the combination on my locker with a click, it swung open – and only on the third try, too. Yet another victory. I allowed myself a small smile at the metal inside and its stack of textbooks. School was confusing, but it was easy. At least, it had the promise of shaping up to be easy. Right now it was at the stage of… getting easier. Classes, those were nothing to worry about; the problem areas were the navigating, remembering, and interacting-

"Elsa?"

Caught off guard by the unfamiliar voice, I turned and looked in both directions before recognizing Hans Westerguard walking over to my left. I couldn't decide what was more disconcerting – recognizing a familiar face at this school, or having someone at the school approach me to speak to me. Three people so far, and that last one was still taking some getting used to.

"Hey, I thought that was you." Hans came to a stop next to my locker; he looked happy to see me. "Do you remember me?"

"Yes." It was a good thing Ali had pointed him out to me before, or else I probably wouldn't have. "It's good to see you again, Hans."

"Same to you." Hans was shorter than I remembered. Maybe it was because he wasn't standing next to his father now; when I'd met him in July he seemed like a skyscraper next to the small-statured Mayor, but now I realized that Hans was only a few inches taller than me. He heaved a deep, smiling sigh, as a steady slew of students trickled by around him. "So, you go to Arendelle now!"

I shrugged sheepishly. "I'm wearing the tie, aren't I?" I noticed that Hans's was cinched tight to his neck – his tie, that is. Lots of other students undid their top shirt button and loosened the tie a little bit (the knot of Ali's tie rested below the second button), but Hans was fully buttoned. Same as me.

"That you are. How have you been liking it?" He looked around the emptying hallway and pointed a thumb towards the main staircase. "Here – walk with me to lunch?"

"Ah…" I hesitated. I thought about Kristoff and Ali on the roof. "I can't. I'm sorry."

Hans let his hand drop, then fixed me with a disarming grin. "Another time, then. You'll have to get to know everyone."

Everyone, as in those two round tables in the middle of the cafeteria? His group of friends? Apprehensive since I didn't know any of them, I still felt an unprecedented wash of excitement at the prospect. If Hans meant what he seemed to mean, he wanted me to be friends with his friends. I didn't know what being included in a group really felt like, in the most basic, archetypical high school sense, but I knew what it looked like. It looked like those two tables. And they looked… well, I didn't really know if anyone ever used this word seriously, in reference to real life people, but they looked… popular.

"Listen," Hans went on, "Are your parents coming to my Dad's dinner on Friday? 'Cause you should come with them."

"I think so," I said. Dad and Mom always went to these things. The thing was, I'd never been to one in my life – not an event that wasn't hosted at home, that is. Would Dad and Mom let me come? Or would they want me to? The hallway was almost deserted by now. "I don't know if I can go, though. I'll have to ask my parents."

Hans shot me a quizzical half-laugh, like he thought I was joking. "Okay… Well, when you find out, come let me know. It'll be great to see you there." He started to backwards walk down the hallway. "Especially when everyone else is so old!"

I laughed in spite of myself and gave a small wave. "I'll keep you posted!"

The bell rang as Hans disappeared down the stairs, and I headed in the opposite direction. As it turned out, the narrow far-end staircases that Ali had led me up towards the roof ran up and down every floor. I could reach that ladder-room from the basement without going near the main staircase, if I wanted to, but the only class I had down there was Physics, and there was no reason I could think of for me to make a quick ascent to the roof right after first period. Now, instead of taking the main staircase to the third floor and hanging back around in the direction of the restrooms, I found that I could just walk the rest of the length of the senior hallway to the end, take those stairs, and save about two full minutes of walking.

Another victory. Not that I was keeping score.

I liked the school more when it was empty like this. Well, it wasn't _empty_ empty – there were still nearly five hundred students clustered in all the different classrooms throughout the building. But the halls were still and quiet, and somehow the alone feeling I got was completely different from at home, where it felt like time would spin, warp, and stretch on limitlessly; by myself here, it was like everything was completely suspended in just one single moment in time. Like everything was frozen, and I was tapping into some secret in-between place in the fabric of things, where only I could move freely.

That was why I was so surprised to run into another person on the side stairs between the third and fourth floors, for the first time in four days (Ali didn't count).

"I just locked the door," the girl said, calling down around a bulky cardboard box that she carried.

I paused just a few steps up. "I'm sorry?"

The girl – the gray skirt and brown box on the stairs – clomped down towards me. "You're going to the art closet?"

It probably would have been smart to say yes, to make up an excuse and lie, but it hadn't occurred to me that there were only two viable options up those stairs, and the second was most likely against school rules. "No?" I called back, climbing back down the two steps to let the girl past. I was awful at thinking on my feet.

Reaching the foot of the stairs right in front of me, the girl lowered the box to peer at me. She had a sweating pink face and two strawberry blonde braids that dangled into cloudy jars stuffed with paintbrushes. It was the girl from the cafeteria. The fork pointing girl. She studied me for half a second and then broke into a knowing smirk over the top of the box.

"Going up to the roof, huh?"

"Ah…" I couldn't think of a lie quickly enough. It was hard to get my brain to work nimbly when I found it so surreal to see this girl up close and in front of me all of a sudden. At least with Hans I'd had a warning – now I wondered why Ali didn't tell me in advance that this girl's eyebrows were expressive and darker than her hair. That was as important as a Mayor's son. Why were those short little hairs the color of worn copper? Why?

The girl edged around me. "Just don't get caught," she said airily, still clearly amused.

I moved after her a few steps. "Do you need any help with that?"

She kept walking, cardboard rustling her blazer as she shifted the box's weight. "No, I've got it." With that, she turned away and started down the flight of stairs on the other side of the hallway – she moved surprisingly quickly with such a bulky box in her arms. Her voice floated back over her shoulder; "Enjoy your smoke break!"

I put out a blind hand, and it landed on something, some surface. "Wait, but I don't…" But she'd disappeared down the stairs. My hand was on the hall-end radiator, resting on its chipped dark-cream paint, and when I looked down and realized it I automatically jerked my hand away – but the radiator wasn't hot, or even on. It was only September, after all.

Up on the roof with Kristoff and Ali, the boys spent about five minutes praising me for finally remembering to pack a lunch ("She eats!" "I'd lost all hope!" "I knew she could do it." "I never should have doubted her." "Such perseverance." "A real underdog story!"). I perched on the ledge by the cafeteria's ceiling window, concentrating half on rolling my eyes at them, and half on… well, nothing concrete. It was more of a persistent distraction that kept my eyes wandering back down through the glass, restless to just point down there, not even at anything fixed. I laughed at Ali's tragically dramatic impression of Lunchless Elsa's Final Starving Moments, and between his dying gasps I shot a quick absent glance through the windowpanes; my gaze landed by chance on the braided girl at that table of girls– the cardboard box girl – with a fork once again in her hand. And in that split second, from all the way down there at that table, she looked up – and I couldn't be sure from so far away, but it almost seemed like she was looking at me. Her other hand's empty fingertips rose up to a narrow V against her lips, and she mimed a puff on the nothing that was there, and then she put her hand away and carried on with her friends.

"If only they'd told me…" Ali wheezed, lying prone on his back with his arms flopping feebly at his sides, "That the rooftop salad bar… was closed."

**. . .**

The next morning I set off to speak to Hans sometime before lunch. When we'd talked in the hallway yesterday, in the very beginning of the lunch hour, it had made me a few minutes later than usual, which had resulted in… no, I didn't want to bump into anyone on the stairs again. Running into other students on my way to the roof was a recipe for disaster – to be specific, a recipe for suspension. I wasn't sure just what the punishment might be for going up there, but I knew that it was probably bad, and that being anything less than careful was very risky.

I'd brought up Mayor Westerguard's dinner last night, at the dining room table with Mom and Dad.

"Are you going to a dinner at the Mayor's this Friday?"

"Mhm," Mom hummed around a mouthful of perch.

"Yes," Dad supplied, "We are."

I'd contemplated the needle-thin bones of the fish on my plate for about a minute. The candles at the center of the table chuckled oxygen in the silence.

"Can I come with?"

Mom and Dad had both looked up from their plates and stared at me. I'd thought I'd been rid of those stares when Kristoff had stopped.

"Uh…" Dad's eyes flickered over to Mom. "Elsa, these events are by formal invitation." He spoke slowly, as though embarrassed for me that I didn't understand the concept of an invitation. "Mayor Westerguard invited your mother and I. We can't RSVP for the two of us and then just bring you along expecting an extra seat."

"Oh."

"It would be very rude," Mom said.

"So…" I'd said carefully, "…So you already RSVPed?"

"Yes, Elsa." Dad's fork clinked against his plate as he sighed. "We already RSVPed."

The conversation had left me feeling extremely foolish, but that was just with my parents. I was dreading how foolish I would feel telling Hans that I couldn't go, and that dread only got worse between each of my morning classes, when each time I scanned the hallway for him he stood at his locker talking with several other boys. Great. This would be fun. I put off the conversation until the five minutes before fourth period English – the last class before lunch, it had to be now – and then screwed up my courage and went over to Hans's locker near the end of the row. He saw me coming, at least; I didn't have to stand there clearing my throat for his attention while his friends looked at me.

"Hey, Elsa," he said as I walked up, pulling out a glossy _Fundamentals of Economics_ textbook and turning to me with a big grin.

"Hello."

"What's up? Oh, wait." He tilted his head toward the boy who leaned against the lockers. "This is Phillip." He tilted his head the other way, toward the boy behind him who was in the middle of re-tucking in his shirt. "And this is Eric. Guys, this is Elsa."

"Hi," they said in unison. They looked nice enough – maybe Eric a little more than Phillip, but that might have just been their faces. Eric had wide, almost unnaturally bright blue eyes that gave him an expression of constant fascination; the slimmer boy, Phillip, had thin, proud-looking features, with long lashes that made him look inattentive.

"Our dads know each other," Hans added, and I felt an instinctive touch of appreciation for the way he didn't introduce me as _Senator Isberg's kid_. I hated that. "So what's up? Did you get your schedule cleared for Friday night?"

"Friday night?" Eric said to Hans, raising his eyebrows. I ignored him. I didn't really care about whatever implications he was making, finding it more rude than anything that he was injecting himself in a conversation between two other people, but something about what Hans said bothered me; it was as though he thought I'd used having to ask my parents as a way to keep from committing to a yes. Was that normal for people who had to field other offers on a Friday night?

"That's what I wanted to talk to you about," I said. "As it turns out, I don't have an invitation. So…" I cast my eyes around the hallway awkwardly. Hopefully this conversation would end quickly.

"Oh, you don't?" Hans shut his locker and turned to me with his full attention. "Well, I'll bring you one tomorrow." He smiled easily, because apparently, it was really that easy. What?

"Where's my invitation?" Philip said to Hans. I gritted my teeth and ignored him too.

"Are you sure?" I said. I thought of what Dad had said last night about the big hassle of adding another seat.

"Yeah, no sweat. Besides, if you're not RSVPed along with your parents, then you can sit with us." I pictured briefly a vision of myself at some high table with Hans and his parents, done up in some evening gown and chatting with the Mayor about the academic curriculum and my thoughts on the public aid budget. At the idea I found myself equal parts flattered and nervous. Before I could say anything, though (not that I had a clue what I'd say to that), Hans went on;

"Anna will love another girl being there," he said. His sister? He rolled his eyes but smiled ruefully. "I drag her to these things all the time but she hates being my date when it means there's no one else but me to talk to."

Oh. _Oh_. I did remember Ali mentioning Hans having a girlfriend. I also remembered that Ali had mentioned Hans being a snake when it came to his girlfriend, but then Ali had said a lot of things about Hans that I was finding were inaccurate. Aside from Ali himself, and Kristoff, so far Hans had been nicer to me than anyone else at Arendelle.

"Well, then…" I brought a hand behind my head to toy with the base of my long braid and gave Hans the beginning of a smile. "I'll be there."

"Excellent." He beamed. "I'll see you around, then." And that was that. I'd done this, and it had been as painless as could be.

"I'll see you. And it was nice to meet you both." As I turned back to head down to English, I glimpsed Phillip's eyes follow me and Eric's elbow nudge Hans in the rib. I'd thought for the longest time that I wanted to be invisible, that it would make me feel safer, but when I'd thought that, there was no one to see me; now, at school and beginning to interact with other people my own age, I found that it didn't bother me any to be seen. I could be a part of this. I could be a part of other people.

That was just one step. A baby step. Now, I had to look forward and see if following through on Hans's invitation would be just as painless as merely accepting, and that would be a leap – if not a pole vault. There was no reason why I couldn't do that too, right?

…Right? Right.

**. . .**

After yesterday's lunch, I'd gone home realizing that Ali and Kristoff had spent the nearly whole hour on the "Lunchless Elsa" skit, and I'd been so distracted that I'd barely paid attention to them. Here they were, clowning around making an effort to include this clueless home-schooled loner girl, and I'd probably come across as a total ice queen. When was the last time anyone had made me a part of their jokes? I felt terrible. I hoped that a tray of Louis's crab cakes would make it up to them; once I'd managed to wobble up the ladder and hoist myself to my feet with a Pyrex tray balanced carefully in one hand (nearly impossible, but somehow managed), I'd shyly held it out in front of me in the boys' general direction.

"I brought something from home for you guys." I hoped I sounded casual. I hoped that this was a normal thing to do. I hoped one of them would hurry up and take the tray.

I shouldn't have worried at all. Kristoff and Ali lit up over my gift – they were guys, what better to bring them than food? I knew I'd had the right idea. They kept thanking me over and over again while they incorporated seconds and thirds into their own sack lunches.

Ali took a bite of his third crab cake and his eyes rolled to the back of his head. "Good lord," he groaned from his usual high-wall perch above Kristoff and I. "I have died and gone to heaven. I'm telling you, Elsa, you have a real future as my personal chef."

I swung my legs back and forth, kicking my heels against my own short wall; the sky was a soaring, cloudless blue today, and I couldn't keep my eyes off it. "Oh, my cook made these. I can't cook anything, I'd burn a salad."

"Cook, huh?" Ali's voice floated over through the fleet of solid pearly clouds I watched drifting by overhead. "You have a cook?"

"Mhm." That big flat-bottomed one making its way towards the playing fields kind of looked like a crab, the more I looked at it. Maybe I just had crabs on the brain. I might have been turning into Louis.

"Huh." Ali was silent for a moment. "Here I was thinking you were a scholarship kid."

Ali's words didn't register at first; then Kristoff shifted his weight next to me, and my eyes pulled back down to earth – well, closer to earth, up here. "Wait, what?"

Ali rolled over on his back and used his heels to inchworm himself down so that he lay across the width of his wall. All I could see of him were his arms, flopped over the edge above his head, and his scruffy black crown of hair. "Two kinds of kids here," I heard him call over. "Trust funds and scholarships."

"He means rich kids and smart kids," Kristoff said to me.

"No, wait!" Ali shouted. His palms and fingers dangled lifelessly over the wall. "Three kinds. I forgot the janitors."

"Thanks," Kristoff said. He gave a short sigh through his nostrils and rolled his eyes.

"I mean, it's a prep school. Pretty pricey place, right? Most everyone here has got loaded parents and Range Rovers. The really _brainy_ ones go on scholarship. That's for the not-so-loaded. Top notch education, and all you've gotta do is shelve books in the library or sell nachos at the football games. Good deal, right?" Ali said this in the same loud, animated voice he'd used for everything else he explained for me about the school, but he still faced away from Kristoff and I. I wondered if he was seeing the crab cloud same as I did; I searched over to where it sailed above the north side bleachers – shapeless. The cloud had bumped and tangled with another, smaller cloud. It would probably find some form a little further out, joined in one with its new partner, over the wind turbines east of Arendelle.

"Yeah," I said. The heavy silence seemed to indicate that Ali wanted me to agree. "Good deal."

"But hey." Ali flipped over and pulled himself back to his elbows on the edge of the wall. His black bangs were askew, scribbling over his suddenly earnest eyes. "The munchies were incredible. My compliments to the chef. What's his name?"

"Louis. He's been with us almost nine years now."

"Lou-wee," Ali sounded it out, taking time to move his mouth over the vowels. "Do you have a butler?"

"No, we don't." I glanced at Kristoff, who met my eyes. "I mean, Kai will help us carry things in from the car, or come bring us something when our hands are full, but-"

"Geeze," Ali said, gazing out towards the parking lot. "That sounds great. That sounds like the _life_. Your parents must make all sorts of dough."

"Uh…" I didn't know what to say. This topic of conversation was making Ali act really strange, and I felt a little uncomfortable. Kristoff cleared his throat next to me, so quietly I almost didn't catch it; I think he felt uncomfortable too, but I didn't know what his feelings were on the subject… whatever the subject even _was_… so I couldn't be sure.

"Hey Elsa, what do your parents even _do_?" All of Ali's attention was suddenly pinned on me, brown eyes bright and wide. "Me and Kristoff totally forgot to kick off lunch with Two Truths and a Lie and all our other favorite get-to-know-you games."

"Well-"

"No, wait, I'll guess." Ali looked up toward his furry eyebrows and stuck out his fingers one by one, tapping his thumb to them each in turn. "Investment banker, neurosurgeon, stockbroke-"

"Ali," Kristoff interrupted. "It's a quarter 'til. Lunch hour's up."

Ali blinked. "Shit, you're right!" Without a moment of hesitation, he swiveled into a sitting position and dropped down from his high wall to the rooftop floor. It was nearly a six foot drop. It was a wonder he didn't break his ankles every day.

I slowly rose to my feet as the boys trudged off towards the ladder. I trailed behind; what was that all about? I had the prickling, persistent feeling that I'd done something to make Ali not like me anymore. But he interrupted my worrying by turning back towards me and flashing a slow, genuine smile.

"I'll hang on to this," he said, holding up my Pyrex tray with both hands – I didn't even know he'd grabbed it for me. I'd forgotten all about it. "It'll be washed and back in your clutches tomorrow."

"How sweet," Kristoff said dryly. He nudged open the trapdoor with the toe of his boot, stepping aside for Ali and I to climb down first. I took in Ali's sheepish grin and in spite of myself, had to agree. He had a face that just made it happen.

**. . .**

I made my way down the front steps after school, wondering if Louis would ask after the Pyrex tray. I hoped he'd forget about it. Really, it was one tray. It's not like I'd ever asked him for anything to bring outside home before – then again, maybe he would be more likely to remember because of that. I had to trust that he wouldn't ask after what I did as carefully as Mom and Dad did. Really, Louis didn't care enough for that.

In the middle of wondering if Louis even knew my first name, I spotted Kristoff walking across the school's front lawn, keeping near to the building. He had a huge white and green bag of something slung over his shoulder, and with his eyes straight ahead, moved with a patient, deliberate ease.

"Hey!" I called out, stepping off the last granite stair and moving on to the grass.

Kristoff peered around the bag on his shoulder ("Scotts ORGANIC CHOICE Lawn Food"), pausing as I caught up with him. "Hey," he said with a grunt, heaving the bag of fertilizer to his other arm. "What's up?"

"Not much," I said, falling into step with him. "I'm feeling a little tired, though, mind if I hitch a ride to my car?" I'd never seen Kristoff on the ground before. Here on solid earth, with walls, tree trunks and roots, and other people around us, rather than just building block ledges, tree crowns, and open, endless sky, he almost seemed even taller. Oddly enough, it made me feel… safe.

Kristoff chuckled, the sound coming slightly breathless as it left his throat. He huffed a little as we gradually neared the far corner of the school building. "No problem," he said. "Carry this over to the football field for me and I'd be glad to let you hop on up." He looked down at me with a sly quirk to his lips.

"Deal," I said, and we kept walking with Kristoff carrying the fertilizer, falling into an easy lull.

As we rounded the corner, the south side bleachers came into view on the other side and Kristoff broke the silence; "I'm sorry about Ali today." He kept his eyes on the grass in front of us.

"It's okay."

Kristoff shrugged – or at least, I thought he did. The fertilizer moved up and down on his shoulder. "He's kind of weird about… I dunno, money stuff. I think some of the kids here get him down."

It had never occurred to me that anyone might like me less because of my parents' money. For a split second I swelled with an inexplicable regret for every cent of it, then deflated with the realization that Ali didn't want to be my friend anymore.

Kristoff must have caught my expression, whatever it was. "It's not your fault, though," he said, jostling the fertilizer for a better handle on it. "He knows you're okay no matter if your dad's a doctor or a banker, or whatever."

I deflated again, but this time it was a slow seeping out of some biting pressure that had filled up around my muscles and bones. It wasn't, 'Ali _thinks_ you're okay'. It was '_knows'_. Kristoff spoke it as knowledge, like awareness of something that was immutable truth. How could he say something like that about me so simply, so casually? The corners of my lips pulled up with a harder, more unignorable insistence than I could remember trying to push against in a long time; I surged with warmth for Kristoff, and said something I hadn't planned on sharing. "Actually, he's a Senator."

Kristoff looked down with eyebrows that had jumped into his hairline. "For real? Which one?"

"Isberg," I said. "Republican."

"Ahhhhh." He looked back out toward the bleachers. We were pretty close to the fields now. "That's cool? I mean, if you like it." His free hand mussed up the shaggy hair at the nape of his neck, eyebrows and nose scrunching in embarrassment.

I laughed. "It's okay." Another pause. "Mainly I just try to stay out of the way."

"I know how that can be."

Kristoff and I passed the far corner of the south-facing side of the school building and stopped up next to the south side bleachers. He dropped his bag of fertilizer to the ground and we both watched a stream of boys in shoulder pads jog out from what must have been the locker rooms to the sun-soaked field. We stood for a few minutes, blinking back the bright rays beating down, content in the breeze and grass sounds of the afternoon. After a little while, Kristoff bent down and heaved the bag back onto his shoulder.

"Well, I've got to get this over to the soccer field."

"Okay." Another group appeared from the locker rooms behind Kristoff and jogged out toward the field. "See you tomorrow, then?"

"Same time, same place," Kristoff said with a wry twist to his mouth, waving before turning around and setting off along the front of the bleachers towards the other end of the football field. I leaned my arm against the lowest level bleachers as the newcomers – all girls in tee shirts and Soffee shorts – trailed by on the grass; it was nice to talk to Kristoff – surprisingly so, given our first meetings. He didn't ask any questions, I noticed; all he did was wait for whatever I wanted to say freely. It was refreshing. It was – wait, were those red-blonde braids?

The girl must have seen me before I'd seen her, because she was already looking at me as she walked by in the middle of the others; she raised her eyebrows at me, so I raised mine in return. I realized I must look odd hanging around the bleachers by myself, but the braid girl – the fork pointing girl – the cardboard box girl – detoured slightly and walked over to me.

The girl stopped in front of me. She turned and peered down at Kristoff's slowly retreating figure. "Are you in detention out here with the groundskeeper?"

"What? No." I was disoriented by the question – of all things to open in with. What was with this girl?

She turned round blue eyes back to me. "So you didn't get caught?"

"I don't even smoke." My fingers curled around an up-and-down metal bleachers bar, absently looking for something to grab on to. A few more cheerleaders – and they must have been cheerleaders, from what Ali had told me – walked past behind the girl with braids. This was somehow the strangest conversation I'd had all day, and that was an accomplishment.

"Well, that's a – what's the word called? A paradox?"

"I…"

"Cause, like." The girl tapped her chin – I almost expected to see a cherry tomato there, rather than the finger she used. "Not smoking significantly reduces mysteriousness, right? But if you're going up on the roof and not doing that – well, that's even more mysterious, isn't it?"

I stared. She wanted an answer, didn't she? _Say something_.

"I can't just tell you about the virgin sacrifices."

The girl's eyes grew wider – how was that even possible? Those huge glittering irises were unnerving. I mentally kicked myself for being so preoccupied with the synopsis of that _Jennifer's Body_ movie I hadn't been able to watch that I'd just blurted out what I'd said. Now I'd totally convinced the cardboard box girl that I really was a Satanist – and why wouldn't she believe I was? I was just some new girl who'd proven to be weird enough already.

But then the girl surprised me by matching the eyes with one of the widest, sunniest grins I'd ever seen. Instantly, warmth curled and purred at the base of my gut. Well. Score one for the slasher fan jokes. I could get used to this whole being funny thing. Looking at that grin aimed at me – yeah, I really, really could.

There was a wind-whistling, boys-shouting pause between the girl and I as she shifted her weight onto one leg and considered me with a curious, cocked-eyebrow expression that I couldn't quite place – she was appraising me, wasn't she? I squirmed a little under her scrutiny, unsure of what to do with my own gaze. My eyes wandered aimlessly; they ended up down to what she wore, her shirt – it was odd to see an Arendelle kid not in the tie and blazer that I'd become so used to. Kids my age did wear tee shirts, didn't they? I didn't know if I even owned a unisex tee like that, with something screen printed – the one the girl wore, it was the same navy color as the blazers, with two white antlers from collar to rib and between them, the bold block letters ARENDELLE PREP _Athletics_. Was that just for her cheerleading practice? Or did she wear tee shirts like that at home too? I wondered if she had a lot of them in a drawer somewhere from being a part of things that gave you tee shirts.

…With a sudden jolt, I realized that a full ten seconds had passed. Shit. The girl was watching me stare now, and with those copper brows just about as high as they could probably go, a blot of pink bloomed below each of her cheekbones. Oh god, she was – was she blush-

The sunburn flared to a sudden boil at the tip of my nose. "I…" Clumsy catcher's-mitt hands dangled at my sides, and I searched for an explanation to offer. "I didn't know we had a mascot."

It was the first thing that came to mind, and possibly even more embarrassing than having been caught transfixed on the girl's chest, was the fact that what I'd just said was completely true.

To my relief, however, the girl hunched into a crinkle-nosed giggle. "God, you _are _new." At the very least, I amused her. That was why she came over and talked to me, wasn't it? '_Come get a kick out of the clueless new kid_', after that very first day when that Ariel girl had told all them about the front door incident – was that really it? I wasn't sure if the girl was making fun of me. How did you know when someone was making fun of you? Didn't it make you feel bad? Because I didn't.

I really didn't. I mirrored the girl as best I could with a tentative, lopsided smile. I could worry about why she was talking to me another time. Or never.

Glancing out at the cluster of girls milling around on the field a little ways away, the girl gave a short staccato sigh. "Well," she said, looking back to me. "I've gotta run."

"Okay," I said. And just as abruptly as she'd walked over, the girl with the strawberry blonde braids turned and began to walk off. She shot me one more smirk over her shoulder, "Try to stay out of trouble!", and then with a twirl of her braids turned and jogged out to the rest of the girls on the grass. I curled my four-fingers wave back into my palm and leaned back into the bleachers. I wanted to hang around and watch the two practices on the football field – maybe moreso the cheerleaders as they were closer – but even I knew how creepy I would look loitering around there. So, after a few seconds of watching the Soffee shorts girls mill around chatting in a clump, I pushed off the bleachers and headed back the way I'd come with Kristoff.

Walking down the lawn, I could think of that girl in terms of all sorts of nouns – braids girl, cherry tomato girl, fork girl, cardboard box girl, overwhelmingly _vivid_ irises girl – but it struck me that I hadn't the faintest idea about her name. Why hadn't I thought to ask?

"Elsa," Mom would say, "What has happened to your good manners?"

"I don't know, Mom," I would say back. "I don't know what's happened to a lot of me."

**. . .**

I expected Friday to take forever to come, but my second week at Arendelle passed quickly. It was a routine settling into place, I suppose; classes became easier to find, my shiny black shoes stepped more sure and straightforward in the hallways, and the maze of blazers all around melted away into harmless, individual faces and figures. It settled that way softly, so subtly that I didn't even notice until I was in the backseat of one of our cars, driving through the lamplit evening to Mayor Westerguard's house. It was Friday night already. I was dressed up with Mom and Dad, and we were rolling across town in the pulsing normalcy of attending a dinner, and I was present. I was _there_.

"You look wonderful," Dad said. I looked from the window to across the dim backseat where he and Mom sat; the tires hummed steadily around the outside, and Dad smiled over at me with poised warmth in his eyes. Mom gave me the same look, the one where they both told me, _This is what makes us glad to be a family_. I exhaled into myself with an off-balance contentment. A nervous contentment. I bathed in the way they both looked at me tonight, glad to give them a reason to do so.

I was their daughter and I could do this.

As the car finally eased in to the Mayor's long horseshoe drive, I took in the big window-lit house and for some reason thought of Louis's Pyrex tray. The tray had come back to me from Ali washed and perfectly clean, marked with just a few little soap spots. I barely noticed them. And I didn't worry about the spots, really, when I handed Louis the tray that Wednesday night – what did I care if he frowned over them and wanted to re-wash the tray himself? As he took it with his thick red hands and put it in a cupboard, though, I couldn't help but wonder if he _saw_ the spots. I thought of Louis and those spots, and thought of myself coming into this house like a tray into a cupboard; did I have any soap spots that anyone would notice? Would anyone think I ought to be re-washed or would they even care?

None of that would even matter since I'd be hanging around Hans tonight, not when he seemed so predisposed to like me. You couldn't tell anything about what streaked me by looking at me, anyway. This was something I was coming to learn as I met new people who smiled when, no, smiled _because_ they spoke to me. There was no reason to suspect what made me tainted. I boosted my own self from inside at the thought, and I felt twigs of excitement sprouting up my spine. I could do this. I could really be one of them.

The front door swung open in front of me and I realized that we'd stepped out of the car, and Jim had driven away, and we'd walked up the steps, and Dad had rung the doorbell, and now here was Mayor Westerguard smiling in the doorway of his house. I had to stop letting my thoughts take me away from the present.

"Well, well!" The Mayor gave a deep laugh that Dad matched as the two of them shook hands. "If it isn't the young man!"

"And if it isn't the… well, you know." Dad raised his eyebrows good-naturedly and they clapped each other on the crisp shoulders of their suit jackets like old frat buddies. I loved how the movies I watched made families like mine and the Westerguards out to be so stiff and medieval – bows, scrapes, _Good evening Senator Isberg, how wonderful to see you and your lovely family on this fine evening, I am most certainly not a human being_, flourishes, more flourishes, etc. …it was laughably unrealistic. Social cues whipped by me too quickly to keep up with sometimes, but even I knew that when Dad put on his slick black formalwear he still liked to talk draft picks with the other men who wore solid gold cufflinks.

I followed Mom and Dad inside the house as the Mayor stood aside and held the door. "Well, well, well." The Mayor's thick gray mustache bristled in a smile as I walked by. "Another beautiful young lady at my stuffy politics dinner, I don't know how I got so lucky."

I felt myself blush furiously. "Thank you for having me," I said to him shyly, looking down at the way my knees slid and shifted the midnight blue fabric of my dress as I moved into the foyer. I secretly loved an excuse to dress up like this, loved thinking that in an evening dress and with my hair all done up, maybe I looked… oh, maybe I looked _nice_. I couldn't think of another word for it, since nothing else really fit right. _Presentable_ was too dry. _Attractive_ was too… well, it associated itself with some romantic scene. And that kind of scene didn't compute with me.

In my imagination I stood in the mirror with my twisted updo and long-sleeved wrap dress, and I said to my reflection, "You look so pretty", as though it was coming from a tall boy the same shape as Hans, or Kristoff. I might lower my voice a few shades and say it, embarrassed with myself, and still it really wasn't convincing. The word didn't make anything happen to me.

"I hope you don't mind, we put you next to Hans and his girlfriend," the Mayor said to me as he shut the front door.

"Not at all," I said. I raked my eyes over the foyer, at the dark hardwood floor and the swollen, glittering chandelier hanging overhead. It wasn't as big, echoing and grand inside as I'd expected it to be. It was beautiful, of course – spotless, well-lit, and of course still enormous – but it was small enough to feel like a home where people lived, even if they did need to rattle around some in order to bump into each other. I liked it.

"It's so great that they're becoming friends," Mom said behind me, "With how hard it is meeting people at a new school. Elsa has been worried about making friends."

I'd never told Mom anything remotely like that, because I wasn't worried about making friends, but okay. I'd roll with it.

The Mayor began to lead the three of us through the foyer. "Well, you be careful with my youngest," he called over his shoulder in a jovial voice. "He'll get you into all sorts of trouble if you let him."

"We'll keep that in mind," Dad said; I could feel his sly grin in the squeeze he gave my shoulder. I knew the whole "dad overprotective of the daughter when it comes to boys" trope well – even though I had this undefinable, surreal feeling that it was a car speeding by on the other side of a highway, one that I would see, and pass, but never collide with. I rolled my eyes up to the white Greco-Roman doorjamb and gave it a small smile; if Dad wanted to live up to that trope, he could go right ahead.

The dining room we were brought into had a lower, welcoming ceiling and an oblong table with tall, leafy plants spaced out along it. About eight men and women sat around the table, with several others standing in conversation on the sides, and the low murmur of chatter fluctuated around the dark wood table and silver candlesticks. I recognized a face or two around this table – was that that Something Gaston guy who was running for Representative this term? I thought I could place his enormous square jaw and slicked-back widow's peak haircut from the campaign posters; there at the middle of the table, where he sat leaned back talking to a short, crooked-teeth man next to him, I could see that in person he was massive. The way his impossibly wide shoulders stretched his sharkskin suit jacket almost reminded me of… it kind of reminded me of Gene from Compass. They were the same huge, broad shape.

But no, this Gaston man at the table looked nothing like Gene, had nothing of Gene's beak nose and fleshy underbite jaw. I brushed away thoughts of Gene and Compass immediately, before they could take root in any of the cortexes of my brain. I said a quick "see you later" to Mom and Dad as they took their seats at this table, and Mayor Westerguard showed me into the next dining room where I'd be sitting. It gave my stomach a little sideways lurch to be going away from Mom and Dad at one of these things, when it wasn't at home and everything was new. But I was doing this at school, every day. New wasn't the worst thing in the world. New tipped me off my center of gravity, new was swooping jelly-legs vertigo, but new was… new, and that wasn't all bad. New didn't come along very often in the five years before now, where the only fresh air that might come in that tall house would be 'Recently Added' on Netflix or a driver who didn't speak to me.

This dining room was brighter than the first, with two giant, plate-shaped lights made of cloudy glass on the ceiling, and a glossy half-wall paneling of solid wood. The table in here was the same oblong shape, with about eight more seated around – all of them men and women I didn't know. I spied Hans at a corner, picking at his cuffs between two empty seats, and as I approached the table he looked up from his wrists and grinned. "Well, look who finally made it!"

I shot a sidelong glance at the Mayor. "Were we late?"

"Oh, no," the Mayor said quickly, giving my back a light pat. "Don't you pay any attention to this one."

"Just ignore me all through dinner," Hans said, and his father laughed.

"That's probably for the best!" the Mayor said. My lips tugged themselves into a puzzled smile at their odd back-and-forth.

As the Mayor went back to the other dining room, I turned back to Hans and indicated the two empty chairs on either side of him. "So, where's your…"

"Oh, Anna? She's in the restroom." Hans pointed to the seat to his left, the one at the head of the table. "Have a seat?"

I pulled out the chair, said "Sorry" to the white-bearded man to my left who I hadn't even bumped, and sat. For a minute or so I looked over the length of the table spanning out before me; no faces I recognized in this room. Hans asked me a few conversational questions about classes (we had none together), and football (had I ever been to a game, and did I want to?), but for some reason my mind was still going back to Gene again, back to Compass. What even was it? It was just that Something Gaston man's shoulders, with the same shape and nothing else, but somehow the picture of Gene in the other man's place kept appearing in my head with a flashbulb puff of smoke.

"Tell them how it happened," he'd say, pulling on his black goatee with eager hands while he leaned in. It would be a fun story for the whole table. Everyone here could hear about my soap spots.

"Where's the restroom?" I said to Hans.

"Through there." He pointed to a door on the opposite side from where I'd come in. "Left at the end of the hall, it's your first door on the left."

"Thanks." I stood and went towards the other door. Just a quick breather, that's all I needed. This wasn't so bad. I knew when it was bad. All I needed was a minute to myself to breathe, a splash of water on my cheeks, and I would be just fine. As I pushed into a short hallway with the same wood paneling as the dining room I'd just left, I felt myself already loosening of the knot of tension that had roped itself thick around my shoulderblades.

I found the bathroom already in use – right, Hans's girlfriend was in there, wasn't she? So I leaned against the wall and waited a minute. I wondered what she would look like.

When the sound of the lightswitch clicked from inside the bathroom and the bar of yellow light disappeared from the foot of the door, I prepped myself for my first impression of Hans's girlfriend. The doorknob turned and pulled in and – a wild last second thought flickered – what if she didn't like me? What if the girl Hans was dating wasn't friendly – or worse, made Hans not want to be my friend anymore eithe-

A girl in a forest green halter dress froze halfway out the door as soon as our eyes met – and it wasn't just _a_ girl, because I instantly recognized the strawberry blonde color of her braided updo, and I instantly recognized the spill of color that now seeped in under her cheekbones.

It was _the_ girl.

I didn't know how much surprise my own expression betrayed, but as the girl stood in the doorway her eyes widened. She spoke first: "What are _you_ doing here?"

"I was invited," I said stupidly. It was all I could think to say.

She blinked and moved forward. "I mean, of course you were invited. That sounded bad. Not that you shouldn't be here, I just… um."

Was she… nervous? I must have caught her off guard as much as she had me, to make her ramble like this. And I realized how frosty I'd sounded just then.

"No, no, it's okay," I said. I tried for a smile, tried to yank myself out of my blank shock, leaving a dizzying heat-surging shock in its wake. "Really." The braid girl was _here_, standing in front of me, standing here in this wood-paneled hallway at this dinner at the Mayor's house. I could hardly process how this could be.

She grinned slowly, the same wide-spreading smile that followed rounded eyes as that time on the football field. She was… happy to see me? "I can't believe it," she said, punctuating with a laugh-breath. "What are… why _are_ you here? Not in a mean way, it's just…"

I couldn't help but laugh. "…A little unexpected?"

The girl bit her lip and looked up at the ceiling. "No kidding."

"My mom and dad are friends with the Mayor," I said. "I know Hans through them." Hans. I suddenly remembered him. Hans, this girl was his… she must be…

"Are you Anna?" I said.

The girl's eyebrows lifted – more surprise. It seemed to never end. "Yeah," she said. And then her brows shot up her forehead as she started forward. "Wait, then you're… You're the Senator's daughter! Hans was telling me about you!"

I gave a sheepish, '_you caught me_' sort of half-smile. "I'm Elsa." It seemed right, now, to finally say.

Anna – that was her name, the cherry-tomato-fork girl's actual _name_ – ran the two middle fingers of one hand over the braided part of her updo that circled just above her ear. "Well, it's nice to meet you, Elsa."

My own hand drifted to my mouth as I laughed again. I couldn't help it. "Yes, for the very first time, too."

Anna giggled. Then she stepped to the side and gestured to the bathroom door, as though suddenly remembering it. "Weren't you going to…"

"No," I said, Compass and Gene and my anxiety completely forgotten. "I don't need to anymore." I paused and took in the pretty glow of her colors – in that dress's shade of green, and in the dimmer lighting of the hallway, her hair looked a more rich red than the blonde it was in the sun. "Should we… get back?"

"Sure." And together we went back through the hallway to the dining room.

"So you've met," Hans said as Anna and I took our seats on either side of him. A salad now sat on each of our plates.

"Best friends already!" Anna said, taking her fork and beginning to sift through the greens. "There's nothing like the bonds you forge in the hallway of the Mayor's bathroom." She then winked at me, and my own fork clinked against my bowl.

As Anna and Hans chatted away, I wondered for some reason about why this girl, this girl _Anna_, Han's _girlfriend_, didn't seem to have told him anything about when she and I had met before. I'd been expecting a, "Hans, this is the girl I was telling you snuck up on the roof and followed me to practice. Isn't that a small world?", and they'd laugh and I would try to force something along with so that it was a _with_ and not _at_ thing. But no. All she'd said was that we were friends. A slow, simmering exhilaration trickled in; _friends_. I tried to imagine how friends with this girl would look as opposed to friends with Ali and Kristoff – it was all I had to compare it to. I couldn't get my brain to picture anything concrete, though, so I gave up, content to focus on listening to Anna and Hans.

Through dinner, I found myself actually participating in the conversation. The two of them talked a lot about people at Arendelle that I didn't know ("Has Snow texted him yet?" "I have no idea. You should tell her to give him some space, though, 'cause I still don't think he's ready to date anyone yet."), but they made an effort to include me – asking me questions and explaining things to me. The topic eventually came back to football; since Hans was on Arendelle's team and Anna cheered for them, they were both at the games on Friday nights.

"You'll start coming, right?" Anna said to me, her eyes hopeful and eager. I didn't know the first thing about football. I had no idea how I'd follow it, if that was even possible. And going to a game, pushing myself into a loud, thrumming crowd, sounded overwhelming – especially if I went by myself. Who would go with me? The whole thing had the potential to be very unpleasant.

"Of course," I said. Anna beamed.

Hans then tried to explain football to me, but Anna saw how completely lost I was and shushed him, saying that the game itself wasn't even important. "I have no clue how it works either, it's just fun to scream with everyone else when something good happens."

She told me about how much more interesting cheerleading was when you didn't exactly know what you were cheering for, then admitted that over four years of doing cheer she ought to have maybe taken the opportunity to learn. Hans rolled his eyes at that.

"Oh! I know!" Anna put down her knife and fork with a clang, making Hans and me jump. "You should try out for the squad! We're having our tryouts next week!"

"I don't think so," I said quickly. It was at least more polite than the "no way in hell" that had slid its way to the tip of my tongue. It was nothing to do with Anna; I was pleased that she wanted me to be a part of her thing. But it wasn't… it wasn't me. At all. Besides, as much as I hated to admit it, it would probably be one of the most unwise things I could do at Arendelle, given my _history_. I didn't want to put myself into situations where I'd have to wear those gloves.

"Other hobbies, then," Anna said, changing the subject. I was relieved that she wasn't trying to press me on the whole cheerleading thing. I told her and Hans about twelve years of piano and eight years of guitar – classical, of course. I paused and, as an afterthought, told them about my thing for movies.

"I don't know if that counts as a hobby, though," I said, looking down at the rim of my plate and shrugging.

"A film buff," Hans said, raising his eyebrows. "Very impressive."

"I'll say," Anna said, leaning in. "All those years of lessons you took! I wish I had that. I tried taking lessons at all this different stuff, trying to find something I was good at, but nothing ever stuck."

"Cheer stuck," Hans offered.

I covered a giggle. "Oh, I'm sure you're exaggerating. You would have been good at _some_thing."

"No, really!" Anna said earnestly. "I'm terrible at everything! I tried piano when I was seven, but my teacher was evil. And then there was gymnastics when I was eight, but I hated the leotards. And when I was ten I signed up for horseback riding, but that was _terrifying_. And I tried ice skating when I was eleven, but I couldn't stop falling on my face, and eventually in middle school I just ended up doing cheer at my school. I don't know how I managed that one, honestly."

Something stuck out at me. The ice skating. I opened my mouth; "Hey, I used to-"

Then I shut it. Something didn't sit right, but as a swirling black water undercurrent crept in the space behind my eyes and the space behind my ribs, I couldn't put my finger on it. Frowning, I rested my chin on my knuckles and stared at Anna as she carried on with Hans. I didn't hear a word they said, only saw as Anna pointed her fork at Hans with a smirk. What was it that she'd reminded me of? Something to do with Anna, Anna and skati-

It hit me like a truck then. It was her.

The girl from the rink five years ago was _Anna_.

It all came back to me in a flood, all the little details and identifiers that I'd been rerouted to forget at Compass. All the things about the girl I'd kissed when I was nearly thirteen, things that had been left to rot in a small pile on a path I was supposed to lose. That path… The Mindfulness Path that had taken me far away. I'd suddenly come full circle and tripped through the underbrush, with no map and no breadcrumbs, and landed where I hadn't visited for five years.

That girl's bright red hair – it was blonder now, but unmistakable. The eyes, round and impossibly bright, the mischievously curled lip corners, the – the – everything unfurled and spun too quickly in my brain for me to follow. It was too much.

"Excuse me," I said, trying not to push back from the table too abruptly. This time I did bump the man to my left. "I'm sorry."

"Are you okay?" Hans said, looking over with a puzzled brow. Anna matched him. Maybe. I tried not to look at her. I couldn't.

"Yes," I said, moving away from the table. "I'm just – Use the restroom." Before I could hear anything else they said, I hurried out of the dining room.

"Breathe," I said to the bathroom sink, hunched over with my palms pushed hard against the polished white counter. "Breathe. Just breathe."

What did Gene say to do when the Paths were rediscovered? Had he ever taught us anything about that? How was I supposed to block off the way back? I turned on the faucet and stuck my hands under the cold water, but after thirty seconds I pulled them back out. I knew it wouldn't do anything. I couldn't do anything about it _here_, not at the Mayor's house, not with Anna out there just a few rooms away.

Anna. Did she remember any of it? Did she leave the Path and cover the tracks, the way I had to? Or had she only passed through once and just forgot all about it? She couldn't have remembered or have made the connection, or else she would have reacted. Would have said _something_. But it was still her. She was still the same girl, that same girl who had made me…

"You don't feel it," I said. "You don't feel it. You don't feel anything." I stared at myself in the mirror, my stricken white face and howling eyes. I squeezed them shut, choked on an absurd wet chuckle at the impulse to now say the "You look so pretty" that I'd imagined before.

After a few minutes, my breathing slowed. My hands prised apart from one another and slid back down to my sides. I had to go back out there. I couldn't stay much longer in this bathroom. I had to face this.

And it wouldn't just be at this dinner, the hurdle not just getting through the night and making it home. I realized with a slow, numb sort of nausea that this would be every day. This would be school. I really, _really_ had to face this.

Because I would see Anna every day, since I knew Hans and now she was my friend. I couldn't just ignore her, now.

…Couldn't I? Wouldn't it just be easier to avoid this girl?

I sighed into the empty bathroom. I couldn't avoid her. Not now, not even before I knew who she was. I never could.


	3. Chapter 3

_**A/N:** So much for just a few days between updates... I'm sorry. Life has been happening so much. It's that time of the year._  
_I hope this is long and substantial enough to make up for how long this took. As always, feedback is incredibly important to me and my writing process. Thanks for reading!_

**. . .**

In the beginning, I'd worried about frostbite. That was all I knew about the mix of hands, and ice, and numbness – frostbite. Dead nerve endings, lifeless black burnt-wood fingers, and inevitably… amputation.

In the beginning, I was sure I'd lose my hands.

When I'd come to Gene with the ice idea three months into treatment, he was so excited. Most of the others in the First Steps program had already come up with their own "ways that work best"; one boy shut himself in a pitch dark room for up to an hour or more. A girl sucked on the sourest hard candy sold in stores. Another boy just did pull-ups. But for the longest time I couldn't think of something for myself. I wasn't afraid of the dark, or really into exercise.

"Well, this is an illness," Gene would say in Group. "You're sick, so let's think, what are your symptoms?" He would press the heels of his hands together, pacing the front of the room. "A cold gives you a runny nose. A flu makes your stomach upset. How does your body react when you get those feelings – or your mind? What are the symptoms? And how, you have to ask yourself, can you treat them?"

And I'd leave Group thinking so hard about Gene's questions, hunched over a composition notebook in my little dorm room trying to come up with my own Way – which wasn't easy when half of the treatment was about ignoring those symptoms. The _symptoms_. That's what they were called. For me, as I'd eventually pinpointed it, the symptom was the tingeing, hot heartbeat feeling. The feeling that warmed the places where my blood reached last when they showed us the pictures of the women on the projector screen. Same as it happened with the girl from the ice rink.

Furnace flood just waxing and waning, waxing and waning, right under my skin.

I shouldn't have even been surprised that there was a Way to avoid the frostbite I was afraid of – there was a Way to avoid anything. No – as it turned out, frostbite was a head to toe circulation issue. It happened with full-body exposure to below-freezing temperatures. Veins and arteries closer to the skin constricted, and the blood shrank back to the center of the body to preserve core temperature; without that circulation, the extremities froze. First skin, then deeper tissue, then nerves, tendons, blood vessels – when it got that deep, the hand – or the foot, or the ear – was dead. No recovery. Chop chop.

Just a _little_ cold, though – just enough to cool off and grow numb – _that_ was different.

Chilblains, as I learned, were a far less severe reaction to cold. With frostbite, the constricted blood vessels meant cut off circulation and everything that followed. Chilblains, on the other hand, came from the constricted veins and arteries – still alive – rewarming. Coming back to normal temperature, they expanded, and when that happened, blood would leak into the tissues.

Fascinating, right?

Most importantly, the angry red itching and soreness that came with chilblains were temporary – usually they lasted just a few days. A week, at most. Nothing died, blackened, withered away.

Every now and then I'd brushed against the idea that it may be for the best that that part of me withered and died, but that part of me didn't live in my hands anyway. It wasn't a siege that would work.

By the Monday after that dinner at the Mayor's, the patchy irritation under my suede gloves had disappeared almost completely. It hadn't even been that bad to begin with; by the time I'd returned home from the dinner, I'd calmed nearly all the way down back to baseline and put myself wrist-deep in ice for only a short amount of time. It was more a matter of routine at that point. I barely even remembered the gloves were on my hand, they were so-

"Fancy," a boy said to me in the shuffle after English, catching my eye and tapping his raised wrist. I stared. I completely blanked on a response, and kept walking.

What was it with random teenage boys? I had no idea.

As I stood twisting the combination dial at my locker, I was still wondering about boys, and why they said the things that they said. Ali was probably the worst. He did nothing that made any sense to me, and _constantly_ had me lost over what he was thinking. What made a boy point down through the cafeteria skylight at a black-haired girl, and ask me what kind of pets I thought she had at home? This was sometime last week.

"…Ask her?" I'd said.

Ali groaned and flopped away from the glass. "Ugh, you don't under_stand_."

"You don't unders_tand_," Kristoff whined from behind Ali.

I really didn't.

Now that I thought about it, though, boys weren't the only ones who had me at a loss like that. Anna might have even been worse. Each time I'd spoken to her so far, I walked away asking myself what had just happened. It wasn't a different language, no; because I _got_ what she saying, but – Why? Why…everything? And why – I looked up – why was she here in the senior hallway walking towards me? With one hand twisting on her braid? And a sunny closed-mouth smile pushing her cheeks apart? Did Anna have dimples? I couldn't remember. Why was I wondering about dimples?

She was much, much worse than Ali, or any other boy.

"Hey, you," Anna said, rocking to a stop next to me on the springs of her feet.

"Hey." I shelved Hamlet – its corners were bending a little by its third week in use – and gave Anna a smile. It was a hollering, run-a-lap-around-the-building frustration to act normal now. To act like nothing was going on, and the girl in front of me wasn't the very catalyst to my ruin, flesh and bone breathing two feet away.

But wait, I had to remember to think of myself as my own catalyst. That was the kind of thing Grandma Willow would tell us, with those broad, round, Life Paths words. I could have rolled my eyes at Anna just thinking about those Life Paths sessions. But she was right there, and nothing was going on, because we were just new friends at school headed to lunch.

…Oh. _Lunch_. How could I have forgotten about that? About _this_ – because it was happening right now. I was going down to sit with Anna and meet her friends, as she'd invited me to last Friday night.

"Ready?" Anna said. "I'm starving to _death_."

"Yes," I said quickly, maybe a little too eagerly in pretending I hadn't forgotten. "Me too." The truth was, I didn't have much of an appetite right now. I could school my outside reactions like a pro and hardly bat a lash, but that didn't change the fact that on the inside I was just plain nervous. I could crumple that up, too, with a little more time and a concentrated effort, but right now, in this exact moment… Anna's powder blue uniform shirt was wrinkled near the collar and it made little shifting movements with her breath. My first thought was, she didn't have her shirt ironed? And my second thought was, wasn't it strange how her clothes responded to her having a body? Wasn't it strange how vulnerable it seemed that she breathed at all?

I had to be on edge. Why couldn't I just act like a normal person when it came to eating the second meal of the day?

As Anna led me down the main staircase, I chanced a question. "So, what, uh… So what are your friends like?" Anna glanced over her shoulder at me with answer-ready round eyes, and before she could say anything, I said, "I'm a little nervous."

Anna looked down, looked back at me with a smile I couldn't read, and then we were at the bottom of the stairs. She stopped walking, and so did I. I felt like a big baby for saying anything, but it was already out.

"And who wouldn't be nervous?" Anna said, all bright and of _course_ understanding, as she leaned her shoulder blades against the banister. "A big group of new people _is_ kind of scary, isn't it."

I gave a weak chuckle. "Yes, kind of."

"I should have remembered to give you the rundown before."

I could see Anna on the roof, hunched over the ceiling glass with Spiderman-flexibility and a scrunched up nose as she explained the different blazers far below. She did Ali a lot more endearingly than Ali did Ali. Probably because obsession with everyone else's lives was only a costume I was putting on Anna for a daydream. Probably also because the image had her in the boys' gray slacks, which didn't really look anything special on Ali, but-

Ali. Ali, who I'd completely blown off for lunch. How did I remember to keep breathing when I was so absentminded? I threw a frowning-brow look up the staircase, at nothing, really, just up the route that went towards Ali and Kristoff. I thought of going up there, thought in a flicker of wild guilt about going up all those stairs to apologize and say where I would be, but that wouldn't work. It would take too long. I heaved a sigh.

"…really nothing to worry about," Anna said – or, was in the middle of saying. "Like, even though Ariel and I are a year younger, they never treated us any differently. Cindy's the sweetest person you ever met in your life; when we were freshmen on the squad, she went out of her way to be nice to us and be friends with us."

I smiled; by now, we had started up slowly walking again. "That sounds like someone I know."

The answer I expected was something along the lines of, _I know what it's like to be the new kid_, or, _Well, we've all been there_. Something simple, that would have made sense. Instead, Anna giggled. "Oh, I'm nothing like Cindy." And that was that. I felt like there was something I was missing, but I couldn't wonder about it for very long, because we got in line with our trays then and Anna changed the subject to me hypothetically smoking ("So I know we established you don't, but you should think about starting, because now that I know you play the guitar I feel like you would look so much cooler with a cigarette in your mouth while you played").

After we got our food, Anna led me to the table in the middle of the room. I tried to look casual, in case any of those girls were already watching me walk over, and forced my eyes to wander everywhere else but directly in front of me. As we neared, I caught Hans over the tops of his friends' heads at the next closest table, and he lit up when he saw me. "Hey, Elsa!"

"Hey, Hans." I smiled back and gave a small close-to-chest wave.

"So guys," Anna said next to me, "I brought a plus one today."

I tore my eyes away from Hans and back to the table I was now standing at. Anna was already sitting down, lip-biting sunnily up at me – she was looking at _me_, not the three other girls semicircled around the table, and I realized that _maybe_ Anna was more concerned about me liking her friends than the other way around. I was probably reading too much into one little look, but still I buzzed at the thought.

"Hi," I supplied, following suit and lowering into the empty seat. "I'm Elsa."

"I'm Cindy."

"I'm Snow."

"Ariel."

They went clockwise from the blonde girl to my left – I hadn't really remembered seeing her before, but she smiled at me with a friendly small pink mouth. I recognized the girl across from me, Snow; the asymmetrical black bob cut sharp to her chin was hard to forget. And I definitely recognized Ariel; she just grinned around a slice of pizza.

"Elsa just transferred in," Anna said, "So I figured we should snatch her up before someone else does."

"Ah, yes," Snow said. She contemplated a cucumber slice at the end of her fork before popping it in her mouth. "Lest she fall prey to stage crew."

"Anything but that!" Ariel dropped her jaw and touched fingertips to her chest.

"Unless you wanted to join stage crew?" Cindy said with a shrug.

Anna leaned in next to me, looking worried. "You're not, are you?"

I blinked. "Uh, no. What's wrong with stage crew?" I didn't even know what stage crew was. I reached out to unwrap my salad, but then – I caught sight of my glove, and whipped it back into my lap before they could see and ask questions. That wasn't a conversation I wanted to have with – or in front of – or anywhere near – Anna.

Cindy crinkled her nose at Snow. "See? Next time you find out before you say things like that, rude."

Snow colored slightly as a laugh bubbled out of her. "Oh, she's not offended. False alarm Cindy, chill out."

I was keeping up with this, sort of. Somewhat. A distracted smile flickering at my mouth, I glanced over at Anna. "Wait, what's wrong with stage crew?"

Anna sank back in her seat with a wry grin. "Oh, nothing. Don't listen to them."

"Anna's so nice." Ariel rolled her eyes. "You know you would rather eat a notebook than be stuck with them."

"I would not!"

"And have a blast watching _RENT_ eighty times in a row with Wendy." Ariel put on a wide-eyed blinking face and took up a notebook next to her tray, stiff-shoulder holding it up to her chin. "Now I'm going to write the lyrics to _Seasons of Love _on your folder to match mine! Bee-eff-eff-els!"

Snow snorted. "Oh my god, that's actually mean."

"No kidding." Anna huffed a sigh, blowing her bangs off her forehead; she glanced sidelong at Ariel, her mouth a long thin line; the expression made her cheeks pouch. No dimples after all.

"What's wrong with _RENT_?" I said. I definitely wasn't keeping up anymore.

"Ah, you know." Ariel chuckled at her tray, shaking her head. "Nothing. Nothing."

I hated how incredibly slow I felt. I glanced at Cindy before turning to Anna, chewing on my lip. "I don't get it."

There were a few seconds of silence around the table while the girls exchanged looks with their trays and each other.

"There's nothing to get," Snow eventually said, heavily dropping her hand from her mouth to the table. "Ariel's just a bitch."

"Whatever," Ariel said around a mouthful of pizza. The tips of her ears tinged pink, and I realized with a restless sinking that things had just got awkward, and I had caused it.

Snow must have hated the pause too, because she ran a hand through her hair and leaned forward. "So, Elsa," she said. "Where'd you transfer in from?"

"Ah. I was home schooled."

"Oh!" Eyebrows shot up all around. My eyes strayed back to Anna. She gave me a sheepish shrugging smile, then reached over under the table and bumped a hanging pleat of my skirt with her knuckles. I felt only the very faintest nudge on my thigh.

I didn't know much of anything about these kinds of gestures, but it seemed like the kind of thing that would happen when you wanted to squeeze someone's hand but couldn't reach it.

**. . .**

"Oh man, this is great."

"Is that what you're calling it?"

"That and more. This place is like the zoo, it's totally fascinating. See, check out that kid over there. He just tried to toss popcorn in that girl's mouth and bounced it off her eyeball."

"That takes skill."

"She'll never date him now."

"Ali, they're like twelve."

"He'll never date anyone."

"Still twelve."

"Forever alone."

We hadn't even gotten to the actual game part of the football game yet, and it was already the most alien landscape I'd ever traveled. As Ali and I made the slow walk from the parking lot to the lights and the noise-thrumming bleachers, all sorts of people in navy and white milled and moved around. I looked one way and there were bored little kids hanging on the hems of parents who stood talking to other parents. I looked the other way and there were clusters of middle-school aged kids horsing around – probably stretching their legs at flirting and feeling like teenagers.

There were so many _blue jeans_.

I wore mine too, and that in itself was an odd enough feeling. I couldn't remember the last time I'd worn jeans in public. At school I had my uniform, and everything else that involved being around other people typically had me in a dress. It was definitely surreal to be out walking around like this, but I blended in with everyone else, and that felt… nice.

When I'd met up with Ali in the parking lot, for the first minute or so he kept staring at me with an unreadable grin.

"What?" I'd said.

"You just look so normal, it's weird."

"Um… I _am_ normal?"

"No, I mean, you pretty much wear the uniform like a model. Compared to the rest of us you look like you're in the cast of _Gossip Girl_."

"Is that like a show or-"

"All I'm saying is I'm watching a dog walk on its hind legs right now."

For some reason, I took it as a compliment. As far as I could tell, it was meant to be one.

As we'd pushed off the trunk of my car and started our walk through the lot, Ali bumped my shoulder with his. "Don't get all weird about this or anything, you're not my type. I don't date white women."

Now as we approached the bleachers, I could see a corner of the game. In a flurry of jerseys and plastic tackle sounds, a group of players on the field collided and piled up on the grass. The crowd groaned, the groan of one collective let-down animal. Ali and I strayed toward the corner of the south side bleachers – the very same corner I'd leaned on when I talked with Anna before I even knew her name. It struck me; if I seemed so different wearing jeans, would Anna be different wearing her cheer uniform? Would she look the same? Would she look at me at all?

"Ah man, all my best friends are here!" Ali grinned up at the breathing mass above us with an over-large sigh.

"These are all strangers," I said. The student section might as well have been a crowd of extras in a Friday night movie scene. "There is literally no way that I go to school with any of these people."

"Well." Ali looked back to me. "Everyone you know is out _there_." He tipped his head out at the field. "Which, also – still can't believe you still talk to me now that you're so cool."

"Oh, shut up," I said, rolling my eyes. When this had first come up a few weeks ago, my stomach was full and heavy with dread. It was just after that first day I'd skipped out on rooftop lunch to spend the hour with Anna and her friends. I'd crept up on the roof the next day, tail between my legs, and steeled myself to lose my first two friends once I confessed everything – how I knew Hans, and how I'd made new friends, and why I hadn't shown up the day before. It all spilled out in the warm floating breeze, and I'd wished the wind had been whistling hard enough to whip my words away.

In the breath I'd held after I finished, all Ali had done was rock back on his heels with a spoiled-milk frown, and said, "Ew, so you're friends with Hans _Westerguard_ now?"

Before I could think of anything to say, Kristoff rolled his neck – little crack, louder crack, another little crack – and smirked at Ali. "We're going to have to figure out how to be civil with this joint custody thing."

Ali sprang up onto his ledge with a gravel-throat groan. "That negligent bastard is not _fit_ for parental rights."

"But he _is_ still her father."

"What if the step-sisters end up a bad influence on my little girl? What if they get her involved in _cheerleading_? I'll never see her again!"

"She's growing up, and maturing into a lovely, sensible young woman. We'll have to trust her to make the right choices."

I'd just stared at the two of them. How were they real? I stuck on something that Ali's words reminded me of from the day before, and the words that fell from my mouth next were, "You're not in stage crew, are you?"

The boys bubbled back in streams of laughter, the neck-arched kind that touched me with a twinge of worry that they would fall. Kristoff said, "See, this is why we like you."

And that was how we established my split lunch schedule with no problem whatsoever.

The idea of explaining it to Anna's friends felt a little more uncomfortable. It wasn't anything I could really put my finger on; I felt that with these girls, there was more of an etiquette to things – whatever these "things" were, I found it tricky to navigate. Lunch, in this case. Girls seemed to have more of a loyalty issue with groups and plans than boys did. Part of me hoped that none of them particularly liked me yet, so that it wouldn't even matter (why did I assume there even would be a "yet"? There was no cause for there to be, except for the fact that Anna liked me for some reason). Still, I didn't want to step on any toes, so I took the easy route and talked to Anna about it alone.

We'd been hanging out in the third floor art studio after school because Anna didn't have practice that afternoon – the same day as I'd talked to the boys about it. Anna worked on a painting she had due for a class – one that she wouldn't let me see, because "prying eyes dilute the creative process"; I just watched her paint, watched her pressed-lip concentration and hair-wisped forehead, while I talked to her. I'd been pretty sure that Anna wouldn't be mad at me for wanting separate time with other friends, but I wasn't expecting her to look up towards the ceiling with a huffed-air laugh.

"God, you are so full of surprises." It was the same _God, you are new_, kind of assessment as before. She commented on me like I wasn't there, and some piece of or around my ribcage soared for it.

"What do you mean?" The irony of playing dumb given what I knew of myself was not lost on me, but I ignored it.

"Just that…" Anna shifted her weight on her short stool, grappling with the wood-backed square of canvas on her lap. I hoped that she wouldn't smudge the wet paint parts on her now-untucked blouse – the blazer limp on another stool – but the idea of paint on her blouse intrigued me. She went on; "You give off this vibe like, oh, I don't know – like you're really mysterious. And I guess you are. But the mystery keeps turning out to be something I don't expect."

I didn't know when I had ever been mysterious before. Maybe the hypothetically smoking thing counted. I leaned onto my knees, counting the sunmotes drifting in the sawdusty room. "What do you mean?" I said again. I never seemed to know what she thought or meant.

Anna smiled at her canvas, then back up at me. "You're this gorgeous Senator's daughter who you would think should be too aloof to talk to anyone. And I'm probably dumb for thinking it and especially telling you about it now. But who cares. Then you end up being friends with the groundskeeper and someone else my friends would probably make fun of. And…" She sighed then, and pushed her palm across her cheek – and there it was, the smallest streak of orange paint on her jaw. "And when you met them they were awful. I hate how they acted with you."

All I could think was… _gorgeous_? How is it that she'd said that to me? An asterisk clung to the roof of my mouth, and I struggled around it to find something to say. "They're not awful."

Anna chuckled, eyes again down on the painting propped on her knees. "But they were. Ariel even said that about you – that you were aloof. What's with that?" Her brow notched in a frown. "Because you didn't laugh at her stupid joke and then disappeared for lunch today?"

"Oh." I had to contribute a complete sentence. "I swear I'm not aloof."

"No, you're not." Anna shook her head hard. "You just don't go along with what catty girls think. And some of them can't _stand_ that." She rolled her shoulders back and exhaled. "I swear they're great people. They really are. They just say and think judgmental things like that about other people sometimes, and I _hate_ how I never say anything. I was so impressed that you did, especially being new and everything. Two years being their friends and I _still_ feel new."

I tried my hardest not to let myself blush. Anna was so candid with her thoughts and her feelings, and I was just… not. I was a block of dead wood. Maybe that was why Anna's friends thought I was stuck up – and it probably wasn't just them. But Anna didn't think I was like that; she saw something in me that was good, and worth knowing, and that had me brimming with some kind of dazed, and some kind of pure, clean feeling. I wanted her to have that feeling.

"I think going against the people you care about is one of the hardest things in the world," I said. I thought of Mom and Dad. "It's easy to think that you're just scared, but you don't want to hurt them, you know?" I pulled in a full breath. "You shouldn't be hard on yourself about it. Letting yourself disagree with your friends is brave enough by itself."

Anna gripped the sides of her canvas and ducked-head grinned up at me through her lashes. "You think I'm brave?"

A chuckle escaped me. I was foolhardy and skittering with the desire to get up and pace around the room. "Of course. I wish I could just _talk_ to people like you do. You make it look so easy to just go up to someone and make them want to be your friend, when I don't even know how to respond to a simple hello."

"You respond pretty well," Anna said. She was beaming. I had made her beam. _I_ did that.

"Just wait and see how well I respond when you start asking me about my Satanic rituals." And Anna flicked cloudy paintbrush water at me, and it landed about two feet short, and that was how we established my split lunch schedule with no problem whatsoever.

Over the past few weeks, it had gone like this: on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I had lunch with Anna and her friends and then tooled around on the grounds with Ali and Kristoff – if he didn't have much work to do – after school. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I spent the lunch hour on the roof with the boys and kept Anna company in the art room after school.

It was surprising how easy it was to fall into a routine, and even more surprising how easy it was to spend time with other people. Going into starting school, I hadn't expected I'd hang out with anyone. Anything other than going home at the last bell had never even occurred to me. But now I found myself looking forward to the end of the day, when I could listen to Kristoff's urban legends or Anna's knock-knock jokes.

Tuesdays and Thursdays were my favorite. It wasn't that I didn't like Cindy, Ariel, and Snow. They were definitely friendly enough, even though they always gave me the feeling that I was only a guest at their table. I just liked the roof better – the sprawling cumulus and loud boy laughs mixing with chimney spout steam, the first place I could associate with having friends.

And those days meant time in the art studio with Anna.

I'd never learned so much about another person. Those afternoons, while Anna sat on her shorter stool painting and I sat on my taller stool watching, we would just talk about _everything_. I learned about how she lived with her aunt and uncle, and missed her cousin who was away at college. I learned about how she'd never dated a boy before Hans and loved how every part of it was new. I learned about how there used to be another girl in their friend group, a girl who would have been a senior this year, but that she died of an overdose in February and Anna thought about her all the time. I learned about how Anna loved thinking up stories and lives behind the people in museum paintings, and how the only thing she liked about winter was being able to pretend she was one of those people who could pull off wearing hats, and how she hated that girls were told they were supposed to shave their legs but secretly loved how it felt anyway.

There was a lot to know.

The interesting thing was that the more I got to know Anna, the easier I found it to see her as a separate person from that girl at the ice rink – a new friend, without any history. It was easier to let go of the old-rooted Compass anxiety and just _relax_ around Anna, guilt-free.

And I'd never told another person so much about _myself_. At first I was at a loss – how could I make this kind of conversation equal? What was there to tell? As far as I knew, I didn't really _do_ anything. Sure, anyone would definitely consider conversion therapy _interesting_, but there was no way I was going anywhere near that topic. Anna nudged and prodded about things she already knew about me to get me talking; I told her that Dad was a partner in corporate law before he was elected to the Senate, and how _Carrie_ had scared me to death when I was in kindergarten and that was why it was my favorite movie now. Eventually things just came freely – like how I'd refused to go more than ten miles-per-hour during the first of my last-minute driving lessons in July, and how I kept a tally of how many times a character repeated wearing an article of clothing in a TV show because I liked thinking that they had a limited wardrobe like everyone else.

I never mentioned skating, either, but that was another given.

"Okay, please tell me you are not drooling over Westerguard out there in his spandex, because I really do not want to have to disown you."

I snapped back to Ali, his all-suffering expression and the bleacher railing stretching diagonally from his shoulder's height up to the black sky overhead. A roar then gushed from the stands right behind him, and I blinked; god knew how long I'd been gazing out at the field completely lost in my thoughts.

"Don't be gross," I said, giving his shoulder a push. My hand hitched for a split second pulling back, realizing I'd never done that before with him or anyone else. But Ali didn't act like it was weird or anything. He flashed a scrunched-nose grin – still contagious – and made to climb on to the bleachers. I followed his lead.

"You know-" We clanged up a few steps- "he _is_ a good looking boy-" and edged into a crammed row- "objectively speaking." Ali and I squeezed into a gap between a clump of boys and a cluster of boys and girls. Now that I stood in the hard breathing center of it all, with all sorts of sounds jostling and rushing up from all directions, the field was spread even wider than I'd thought it could look. It certainly didn't seem that it could be this long from the ground, or from the eyes of someone who was only seeing grass.

I still wasn't one hundred percent sold on this whole football thing, but I had to admit, I was energized by it. If I was Emerson, I would spend pages and pages on how human and alive I felt out in the crackling purple night air. But I wasn't Emerson, so I turned to Ali instead and said, "He _is_ Anna's boyfriend, objectively speaking."

Ali _pshh'ed_, loudly enough so I could hear it over the noise. "There you go again with your _morals_."

My eyes flitted over everything in front of me, looking for… "There's also the fact that he's not my type at all." I didn't even know what my type was, as far as boys went, but it made sense to say. It was true, after all. Hans just didn't stir anything in me.

"Thank god for small favors," Ali said. And then I found her – it wasn't that hard. The cheer squad lined out on the grass right in front of the bleachers, next to and behind the football team's bench.

They all bounced in place in their white Under Armour and navy uniforms, rustling pom-poms together. Anna stuck out in the middle-right front, and I'd been right to guess – she _did_ look different. Her face shone flushed and bright under a high ponytail – maybe the absence of the braids was what did it. But though she seemed transformed under the sound, the energy, the costume of it – she was still unmistakably Anna. The stretch to her smile was the same as it was in any mundane conversation about which Kaki King song was my favorite to practice. I wondered if there was any chance she could see me up here. It wasn't likely.

I picked out Cindy, Snow, and Ariel too; Cindy was a little harder to find, since she didn't have features that particularly stood out. Snow looked odd as the only girl without her hair tied up tight on top of her head (it was too short), but it still looked good. Fantastic, even. If anyone looked like a model, it was Snow. I found myself wondering what she would wear outside of school. I had never wondered it about anyone before Ali had brought it up – well, aside from Anna. So far, I'd seen school uniform Anna, cheer practice Anna, dinner dress Anna, and now cheer uniform Anna (I might have liked this one the best). But I still didn't know what she wore when she could choose for herself.

"That's more your type, right?"

This time, I could have sworn I heard a crack in my neck when I whipped back to Ali. His quirked-eyebrow smirk met the wet-cotton blood that rushed to my ears with the strangest contrast.

_Hello, completely casual remark, meet my immediate panic._

"What do you mean?" I managed to force out. I really didn't know what he meant, but the tiny splinter of what he implied… This was just another of the out-there things that Ali just _said_, right?

"Oh, you and your googly eyes," he said.

…_What? _What was he talking about? Had he caught me staring at Anna – now moving into a formation with the rest of them out of the corner of my eye, but I didn't dare to look – and oh god, the thought paired with his words had me almost fall off of the metal bleacher I stood on. But Ali didn't look mad, or grossed out, or suspicious – he grinned like always, lids and lashes lazy. Was he adding anything up? Was there something _to_ add up?

"Cheerleaders are weird," I blurted out. My explanations were really on point lately. Maybe my nauseated lip curl read as judging – I had to hope I knew my audience.

Ali's head tipped back when he laughed, his wrist coming up under his rib. "One hundred percent accurate. Though, are you saying that's what you're thinking whenever you're staring off at something?"

My pulse was still punching my ribcage even though I had no idea what had just happened – just that somewhere in there, Ali had sort of implied that I – that Anna was my –

"Totally," I said. "Constant judgment."

"Wow. You'd think that that would make you kind of a bitch."

"I'm not here to make friends. This is a competition." I may or may not have spent the summer watching _America's Next Top_ Model marathons.

Apparently Ali had, too, because he giggled and said, "Be quiet, Tiffany!" And we moved on.

As the game went on, banter carried on as usual between Ali and I. There as no weirdness about what he'd said, but yet I slowly felt myself drifting off into a… disconnect. The yells and sounds of the game faded in volume as the gnawing silence of my worry moved in. I couldn't put a name to the worry, couldn't catch up to it to see its face, but still. It grew. It grew from the single short clip that played itself over and over and _over_ again.

Elsa stares at Anna. Ali says, "That's more your type, right?"

Ali says that Anna is Elsa's type. A guy in a suit on some sports channel pulls up the clip, and draws a squiggly yellow line between the girl in the cheerleading uniform and the girl with the blonde braid. X's and O's dotted in on the sides.

But Anna was my friend.

And Anna was a girl.

It didn't make sense. Of course Ali was just messing around, but how could I even know if it was a stupid comment, or a joke out of something he really _believed_? Did it even matter what he thought when the idea of being attracted to Anna was a lit match straying to the grease-soaked tip of my braid?

Anna. I glanced over at her and a cheer erupted from the entire starry night. She was mobilized – it was a touch down – there was sweat gleaming at her throat and I felt myself get sick.

"I have to go," I said to Ali. It was almost halftime.

"What? Wait, why?"

"I don't- I don't feel well. I'm sorry." It wasn't a lie.

He scratched the back of his head – bumping some girl behind him in the stomach with his elbow. "Shit, are you okay?" he said.

"Yeah, I just-" I shifted my weight with the restless feeling that everyone was watching me. That this crowd was here to see me, not the football game. Would they be leaning in for that instant replay? Wouldn't they be rooting for me to fumble? "I'll see you on Monday?" I said.

"Yeah," Ali said, frowning with huge worried eyes as he watched me step down. "Text me when you get home, okay? Let me know you got back safe."

I said something to him, some kind of _okay_ or _yeah see you_ that came automatically, and was already moving out of the bleachers, leaving Ali looking smaller and scrawnier than usual by himself in a crowd. I walked back to the parking lot at a single-minded alarm clock pace. I didn't blend in here anymore, but I had to get back.

It was later on, around midnight, when I'd slid into my satin bedtime gloves and between my sheets, that my phone rattled angrily on my nightstand. At least, it sounded angry to me - it came from nowhere, breaking the silence of my dark room with an unapologetic buzz and a square of blue light, and it made me twitch with a fight or flight panic. I'd probably jumped because I'd only had a cell phone for a week, and getting notifications was still new.

Anna had made me get it – well, she hadn't _forced _me, but it was the total shock rounding her eyes when I'd said I didn't have a number to trade that had made me run home that night and ask Mom and Dad for a cell phone. They'd been thrilled, of course – I was getting involved and making friends like a _normal _kid.

I only had seven numbers – Mom, Dad, Gerda, Anna, Ali, Kristoff, and Cindy – so I had a pretty good idea of who it could be. I sat up, carefully took up the phone between the sides of both palms (it was the least painful way), and checked my new text;

_Anna:  
Why did you leave so early? _

The idea of Anna noticing me where I'd stood in the stands made the phone feel like a hot brick in my hand – one that had been lying in the sun all day, that could burn bare feet. This brick was heavy, too. I sat for a minute. Then I slowly placed my phone face-down on my nightstand and hunched into my pillow.

**. . .**

It was easy to stay home from school on Monday. There was a routine of waking at seven a.m. on Monday morning and settling into the knowledge of an entire day spent in the house, and this routine had only been sleeping for a month and a half. It had barely napped. It was able to stretch its arms out in front of it, catlike, and assert itself as all of my plans for the day. Avoiding Anna was a lot easier when I was telling myself that I was welcoming an old friend.

As if this house was my friend. That was a great joke.

I went downstairs to the kitchen where I found Mom, coffee travel mug in hand, getting ready to walk out the door. I hung around the doorway and told her I thought I had the flu, then asked if she would call the school so I could get an excused absence. She did it for me and left for work. The two of us did not make eye contact throughout the entire exchange. This wasn't really new.

The first one came around twelve-fifteen. A text from Anna while I searched the cabinets for peanut butter (Louis didn't come in during the day anymore) – _Are you okay? Worried about my favorite chain smoker… _The peanut butter sat on the counter for nearly half an hour while I stared at my screen and scrapped nearly a dozen replies. I'd stand up to get away from the phone, start scraping a knife across my toast, then leave it and go back to the table to look at the text again.

The second one came around two. This time, it was from Ali_; Playing hooky huh? Dont let me catch u down the swimmin hole tom sawyer. _My first thought was that he probably did an excellent Aunt Polly imitation, and I'd have to ask him to do it for me tomorrow; what hit me next was the idea of being around Ali after what he'd said about me – and Anna – and me and Anna – and the thought of an Aunt Polly imitation suddenly made me very sad. I didn't know if I could face Ali tomorrow.

The third one was just a little over an hour later. I was flipping through the songbooks I kept in the second floor music room; my guitar case yawned open at me, bored of the fact that I'd been looking for something I wanted to play for fifteen minutes now, and I welcomed the distraction when my phone buzzed in my pocket.

_Kristoff:  
your friend with the red hair is looking for you_

…What?

I fired back: _You talked to Anna?_ The answer came just a few seconds later.

_Kristoff:  
yeah her haha, she just came up to me on the field and asked where you were. It was kinda weird_

_Kristoff:  
are you avoiding her? Should I have told her you were dead?_

I blew out a sigh and looked around the rose carvings on the ceiling. This was bad. More like, actually, it was _good_, but… No, no, it was _bad_. Avoiding Anna was supposed to be easy. She barely knew me, and shouldn't have missed me. I barely knew _her_, and shouldn't have missed _her_, but it was just my terrible luck that I did. Oh, did I ever. And apparently, Anna missed me too. Some muscle, some organ writhing up at the base of my throat had me swallow hard.

It would be so much easier if Anna didn't want me around. Why did she want me around? I lifted my phone from my lap and replied: _Sorry about that. I'm not avoiding her, just sick today._

_Kristoff:  
uh oh… are you okay?_

That was the million dollar question, wasn't it? I didn't know what to do with myself. I hated that I found myself thinking of Gene purpose, that I conjured him up; I hated being weak and needing him, hated, hated, _hated_… him. But he knew what to do – what would he tell me to do? I clenched lace knuckles at my temple.

The new ideas wouldn't come, but I knew what my muscle memory wanted to do – gravitate back. Deep breath in, deep breath out. It was true. Even though Anna meant temptation, I still wanted to be around her. And the thing was, even with that dark possibility… it wasn't like I had _done_ anything. I hadn't. And I wasn't _going_ to do anything. I didn't _want_ to do anything, for that matter, because I wasn't attracted to her. I had this under control. I had myself under control, didn't I?

So why shouldn't I go back?

"Look at you!" Gene would say. "An ambitious idea. Forcing yourself to face your biggest temptation? That'd desensitize you to its effects. Raise your immunity to your illness the hard way. No one could ever accuse _you_ of taking the Path of least resistance."

I took my phone to respond to Kristoff: _It's nothing. I'll be back tomorrow._

After that, it only took me about a minute to choose a song.

**. . .**

It didn't take me very long to find Anna's locker on Tuesday. When I went down the first floor hallway after fourth period, I spotted a pair of reddish braids halfway down; finding her was easier than I'd thought it would be. All of it was easier right now, but that was because I was ignoring my overworked brain and running on autopilot. It was the only way I could push through coming to school today, and the only way I could tack myself to what I was approaching. I took a deep breath, weaved around moving blazers, and came up next to Anna. She was shelving a few books – smaller books, paperbacks. Did she like to read for fun? A split second of space had me guessing that she was the type to read with a stuck-out pink tonguetip.

"Hi," I said. Anna's eyes widened with a double-take straight out of a cartoon.

"You're alive!" The books that teetered halfway into Anna's locker came with her hand as she threw it around my neck. I stiffened into her hug on instinct, then melted and gave an awkward shoulder pat in return.

"Sure am," I said, as Anna pulled away. I found a lopsided smile inside myself and pushed it on. "Alive, and… I owe you a lunch period."

Anna rocked back on her heels and raised her eyebrows. "And an explanation?"

She didn't seem like she was actually _offended_, but I still felt guilty. "Yes. Ah…" I raked what I could feel of my nails through the suede glove tips up and down the back of my neck, glancing around the floor. I must have looked like Ali. "Listen, I'm sorry I didn't reply to any of your messages all weekend. There was some stuff going on at home and it just sort of got lost in the shuffle."

Anna frowned. "Is everything okay?"

_Nothing, just the fact that I realized being around you could ruin everything I've worked at for so long._

I shook my head with a shrug. God, the real truth was so easy to mask. "Ah, yes. It is now. Please don't worry about it."

"Really?"

"Really," I said. "It's not a big deal."

Anna must have caught my silent request to keep this at arm's length – probably thinking I was having a private family issue or something – because most of the air went out of her concern.

"Well…" She side-eyed me. "As long as you're okay. And I guess I shouldn't expect you to be surgically attached to your phone like the rest of us just yet."

I felt brave from how surprisingly _painless_ this was – I put on the most pitiful round eyes that I had. "I was a home schooled kid, I don't know anything about teen social interaction."

Anna was trying to look serious, and I tried not to notice how hard she bit back a smile. Neither of us succeeded. She cracked and whapped me on the arm. "Well now you know you need to text back next time, weirdo!"

I grinned, and as Anna shut her locker, I started to drift towards the cafeteria. "I don't know how to unlock the home screen."

"Isn't today your roof day?" Anna said – but she was already moving off with me in the direction of the cafeteria.

"Maybe." I couldn't even think about this right now. After Friday, putting Ali and Anna in the same thought bubble made me itch. "But not really. Today I'm down here." Most of me was convinced that doing this was proactive – a smart, Compass plan.

I felt smart until Anna put a carton of chocolate milk on her tray, turned to me, and said, "So, I was wondering – do you want to go to Homecoming?"

I'd been looking across the cafeteria at this table – a bake sale, it looked like, with a blown-up picture of a blonde girl next to it, but at Anna's words I almost tipped back on my heels "I– me?"

"Well, yeah?" she giggled. "It's on the twenty-third, will you come?"

"Uh…" A curl of heat raced around the tip of my ear and down to my neck. There was no way she was _actually_ asking me to–

"I mean, I know you're probably thinking it won't be your thing," Anna said quickly, "But it's totally a lot more fun than you'd think. We're all going in one big group and I'd– we'd love it if you'd come with. It's not like you need to bring a date, either – I mean, not that you couldn't if you didn't want to, because you could get a date easier than anything. I just know that if I wasn't going with Hans, I'd, like, hear a slow song and feel soooooooo bored–"

How could I be so stupid to forget about Hans? Of course Anna was going with her boyfriend. To think for even a fraction of a second that Anna was asking _me_ to be her date… it was laughable. It had been downright terrifying, in the moment, but now the thought of Anna asking me? It was a joke. And the thought of actually _being_ Anna's date… that was a punchline I couldn't even picture.

I couldn't really picture anything about a Homecoming dance – had no clue what any of it would look like, but my brain filled in with one of Dad's galas – except with a bunch of teenagers instead of politicians. And instead of Mom and Dad, I hung around with black-haired Snow and red-haired Ariel. Homecoming sounded like a strange ritual.

"Okay," I said. "Yeah, I'll go." It was another ink blot agreement, spilled because Anna asked – and it could easily be another bad idea, like the football game. But Anna lit up next to me with a wiggling excitement, and I knew that even if I'd made the wrong decision, I'd made the right decision.

"Guess what," Anna said as we both sat down. "I got this one to join our Homecoming group." Ariel was turned around talking to one of the boys at the next table, the table with Hans and his friends, but both Cindy and Snow smiled at me.

"Looks like we outnumber the boys now," Snow said.

"Do you have a date yet?" Cindy said.

I said my quick no and changed the subject. Things settled and shuffled around in the normal way of conversation that these girls had; they were more Anna's friends than mine, but there was something comfortable about being around this group. After about ten minutes, Snow shifted in her seat and narrowed her eyes over at the bake sale table I'd glanced at coming in. "I can't believe they're actually doing that."

"Doing what?" Ariel looked around. I followed; the table's floor-length banner read, _PRESCRIPTION AND HEROIN ABUSE AWARENESS MONTH_. A boy I didn't know and two girls I didn't know stood behind it, selling what I was guessing were saran-wrapped cookies and brownies.

"Using her like that, for their _crusade_." Snow kept staring over at the table.

"I think it's a good idea," Cindy said.

"Well, of course it's a good idea," Snow said. There was a pause around the table. She went on, "But they didn't even know her. It's like she's not even a real person to them, just a… cautionary tale."

"And of course it's Jane and Milo and them doing it, too," Ariel said. "I bet this looks just _great_ on their college applications."

"Made an O.D. mascot out of some dead girl's memory," Snow said. "Sold some snickerdoodles, saved the world."

"Can we talk about something else?" Cindy said, and Snow fell silent.

This pause was longer, and in the space filled by cafeteria chatter, I looked back at the big square picture propped up on an easel next to the bake sale. _Aurora_. The name came to me with a jolt – that was the girl that Anna had told me about. Their friend that had died earlier in the year. I was probably sitting in her seat.

She smiled back at me, proud and effortless. I could just picture that old-Hollywood bone structure dazzling at the tail end of a cheer on the sidelines. The thought naturally happened in slow motion; she was gorgeous. And she was dead. I knew what had happened to her – a drug overdose of some kind – but what had _happened_? Who was she? What was she like?

I wanted to ask all those questions, but one look at the faces around the table and I thought better of it. Cindy and Ariel just watched their forks, but Snow glared off at the display with a stone set brow. And Anna – Anna, who hadn't said a word, sat and hugged an arm to her chest with hunched shoulders. I didn't know the girl Aurora and couldn't feel much more than pity and curiosity for her, but I knew Anna, and seeing her like this had my insides lurching in her direction. I didn't know what to do.

I remembered the time I'd met these girls, how Anna had reached to bump my skirt under the table. I wanted to do something like that for her, too – wanted her to feel like what made her frown was palpable and mattered. But those navy gloves were on my hand. I couldn't. I couldn't put the suede anywhere near Anna, and I was wrenched helpless for it.

Then Anna gave a shuddering sigh, and I just… couldn't remember to _care_ about the gloves anymore. My fingers snaked out to the hand that drooped at Anna's side – slowly, slowly – and hooked into two of her fingers. Anna looked down with surprise, but didn't flinch or start; she cocked her head just slightly and ran her thumb along the stitching at my knuckle, curious – I felt that lurch again, and thought for sure that I would throw up, but then she smiled at my hand. And she squeezed my two fingers with hers, and turned that smile up at me, and it somehow amazed me.

That she smiled at the glove _first_.

I forgot about Aurora. I forgot about the dull red pain that crawled around my fingers. I forgot about the other girls at this table, and about Homecoming, and Gene, and I forgot about the Pyrex tray in Louis's kitchen.

I just held Anna's hand.

**. . .**

To my own surprise, I ended up asking Ali to Homecoming.

Of course, I made up with him first. Not that there was really anything to make up; as far as he knew, the only issue was that I'd moved around my lunch routine and spent more time with Anna and the other girls this week. But he didn't seem to take it personally – I was again incredibly glad to be friends with a boy. When I apologized, he just slugged me on the shoulder and monkeyed up to his usual ledge. Kristoff smirked at me like we were his favorite sitcom.

I asked Ali to be my date because I realized it would be a good way to be normal. It wasn't an easy decision to come to; the idea of a _date_, when I'd never had one in my life, was the strangest hormonal terror. But my treatment at Compass had me _duh_-ing myself – _duh_, of course I should go to a dance with a _boy_. And as scary as it would be to go to something like this in a pair with another person, with the romantic implications that came with that pair being a pair, it would be even scarier to stand out as the girl who went by herself. I knew that it was the norm to have a date to high school dances. Besides, going alone would probably have Ariel, Snow, and Cindy thinking I was aloof. Too good for any of the boys at Arendelle, or something. Anna kept telling me that I was wrong, but I couldn't help getting the feeling that her friends didn't like me. I didn't care all _that_ much, because I had three friends of my own, but I _was_ still trying.

Ali ended up turning me down, anyway.

"I don't do dances," he said. We sat together on the north side bleachers, watching football practice crunch and crawl on the field. The afternoons seemed calmer lately, with the sky growing grayer and the air getting chillier.

"What? Come on." I huffed a swipe of hair off my lip. "Why not?"

Ali rolled his shoulders around under the denim jacket he wore – it looked odd with the tie and blazer underneath it. "'Cause they're laaaaaame-o."

"Not even."

"A slave celebration for the bourgeoisie masses."

I snorted. "Have you ever even been before?"

Ali tore his eyes away from the field. "Uh, have _you_? Ms. Emily Dickinson?"

"Well, no. But I spent all those years locked in my room just _dreaming_ about a Homecoming dance." For some reason, I loved it when Ali joked about my home schooled years. It gave me permission to laugh at it myself, and that was something I really had to start doing.

"You'd think you'd be dreaming up an escape plan."

"I have about eight notebooks full of poems about Homecoming, if you want to read them sometime. Ali, will you _please_ go with me?"

"No way, Jose," he said. He frowned into a short gust of cold wind that ruffled his scruffy bangs – blown black leaves. "I'm telling you, you're gonna hate it. It's really not your thing."

"Whatever." A month and a half ago, I'd never have answered like that, in such a– in such an imprecise, _teenager_ way. I was really picking up from the people I hung around with. I then spotted Kristoff approaching from the school side of the field, walking down the sideline with a shovel and a shovel-sized sapling.

"Don't do it," Ali said to me.

"Hey, Kristoff!" I called down. "Will you go to Homecoming with me?"

As he passed by, Kristoff called back, "Do you not see how I work here?"

"One day you'll listen to me when I say words at you," Ali said.

By Friday it was just over one week until the dance, and I didn't have a date. Snow told me not to worry, that she didn't have one yet either (she was apparently waiting for Phillip to ask her, according to Anna) – but I didn't know how to tell her that it wasn't going to happen for me. The only boys I knew were Ali, Kristoff, and Hans, and none of them were an option. I'd resigned myself to the reality of going alone; having a date was a nice idea, but realistically it just didn't seem to be _me_.

That was when something odd happened.

It was after fifth period European History. As I trickled out of the classroom, Hans's friend Shang trailed after me.

"Hey, Elsa?"

"Hey," I said, as Shang fell into step with me. "Shang, right? What's up?" Of course, I remembered his name, but since I'd only met him once or twice and never actually had a conversation with him, it made sense to play a little dumb for the sake of not looking like a creep. It was probably for the best that I didn't let on that a skinny little acrobat regularly parked me on the roof and told me about everyone's lives.

"Not much," Shang said. He walked with me slowly, thoughtfully. "Heard you're going to Homecoming in our group."

He must have meant the middle-lunch-tables group, the girls I sat with and the boys they matched up with. I realized I hadn't really been paying enough attention to who was going with who. "Yes, I am. Who else is?"

"Well, Hans and Anna. And Henry's going with Cindy, and Eric with Ariel. Phillip's going too, and so is Snow, and then you, and me. Ten of us, so far."

"Hm." Eric was the one with the blue eyes – last week Ariel had spent half of a lunch period twisted around in her chair, picking white dog hairs from his blazer. I had no idea who Henry was.

"So, I'm making the reservations for dinner," Shang went on, rubbing his chin. "I was wondering, should I keep it at ten? Or are you bringing someone?"

"Oh. Um, no."

"So you don't have a date?"

I shrugged, and we rounded to the foot of the main stairs. "No." No date, no date, no date. It was pretty well established. I had this sudden image of myself at Homecoming, where everyone else kept asking me who I came with – over, and over, and over again. They'd smile, and ask, and I'd answer, and their faces would fall, then the slate would be wiped and they'd smile, and ask again. Rinse, repeat. The thought made my skin crawl.

"Well, uh." Hanging back, Shang put his hand on the banister, and I paused on the second step. It was weird to be at eye-level with him, but something about it was different. Different, nice. He looked less severe with his face and eyes pointed slightly up at me, rather than down at me.

"Do you – would you like to go with me then?" he said. "Since we're in the same group already?"

I blinked. _Oh_. This was definitely not what I'd been expecting when Shang had started talking to me. But the shock didn't hit me with an aggressive, unpleasant force (like so many surprises did). Instead, I looked at Shang's smooth forehead and patient mouth, and although the thought of interacting with a teenage boy I didn't already know was a surreal one, I couldn't see any reason why I should say no.

"Okay." I pulled my braid around my shoulder and toyed with the tip. "I'd love to." And after that Shang double-checked to make sure he'd heard me right, programmed his number into my phone, and walked me to my locker. Just like that, I had a date to Homecoming.

Who knew I'd be so good at pulling off being normal?

But that wasn't the last odd thing to happen to me that afternoon. When I was leaving the girls' bathroom after the last bell – hitching the strap of my bag on my shoulder and wondering what Ali would have to say about the newest development in my Homecoming saga – I bumped into Phillip.

Literally.

It was the whole collision cliché from the movies; I clipped his elbow with my bag and his books slipped to the floor – papers scattered around and everything. It could only be more predictable if we were love interests and both knocked on our asses.

"I'm sorry," I said, dropping into a crouch to grab at the papers as Phillip did the same. "I'm so sorry, I'm such a klutz."

"Don't sweat it," Phillip said, shuffling a few wrinkled sheets together with a grin. "It's only Geometry, anyway."

I lifted and looked at one of the papers – a couple of story problems and messy isosceles triangles were scrawled on the page. "Fun stuff." We stood back up, and I stacked the sheet on the top of my pile and handed it over to Phillip. He glanced at my hand while he took the papers from me.

"So no fancy gloves today, huh?"

My hand zipped back to my chest with a mind of its own. "I– what?" Then, it clicked; that boy who'd called my gloves "fancy" after English a few weeks ago – it was Phillip. I hadn't recognized him at the time, having just met him. I felt my cheeks itching with color and shrugged. "Yeah, I wear them sometimes when I'm worried about getting sick. I get sick easily, it's really annoying."

"Ah." Phillip stood watching me with an eyebrows-raised smile on his mouth. I shifted my weight and glanced around the floor – was he waiting for something? After a second, Phillip spoke again.

"So listen, would you want to go to Homecoming with me?"

I stared. "Um." What the… what? I knew I was supposed to say something, but really – all I could think was that I must have been living someone else's life. Asked out by two different boys – two different _good looking_ boys in one day? That didn't happen to me. But apparently it did, because now I stood in front of a lifted-eyebrows boy who hammocked his fists in his pockets and waited for an answer.

"I'm sorry, I'm already going with Shang." It was times like this when I wished I had an instruction manual for high school. _Chapter Thirteen: How to Say No to A Homecoming Invitation_. Should I have said that I was going with Shang? Or was that bad etiquette?

"Speedy bastard," Phillip said with a side-eye at the water fountain. He looked back to me and rubbed the bridge of his nose with a rueful grin. "Anyway, I just figured I'd ask."

"I'm sorry," I repeated.

"No big deal." Phillip shrugged and re-shouldered his own bag. "I'll see you around, yeah?"

"Sure."

As Phillip walked away, I looked around at the lockers. When had my life had turned into a high school movie?

**. . .**

If I'd have known about the pictures, I might have reconsidered my decision to do Homecoming.

"You never told me there would be pictures," I said into Anna's shoulder, following her and the others out into the Westerguards' backyard.

The two of us trailed behind a flock of kids and parents as we processed out to the sweeping near-sunset yard. Anna put out her arms for balance as we stepped off the patio – walking on grass in heels seemed like a struggle for her. "Oh, chill. Just supermodel the whole thing."

"But I haven't practiced my smize in ages. I'm too rusty." I thought of Ali, oddly. What would it have been like if he'd agreed to come with me as my date? Ariel's laugh flashed bright a few feet ahead of me, and I wondered – if Ali was here, would she be laughing at him, instead of at whatever Eric just said? I could just see him swinging his arms back and forth in a baggy suit jacket, spouting _America's Next Top Model_ quotes that would make Hans and Eric stare.

It wasn't fair. I still wanted him here.

It was lucky I had Anna. I was settling into hanging around the other girls in this friend group – Snow and Cindy and Ariel – but with the group doubled with a bunch of boys I didn't know, the muscles in my torso stiffened back up. The tight feeling had me drifting to Anna more than I probably should have. It was kind of pathetic, but I couldn't help it. And besides – it's not like Hans and Shang hadn't been joined at the hip for the last half hour in conversation about someone named Drake.

"You'll be fine," Anna said. "Smizing is just like riding a bike." Eyes trained on her feet, she felt around and took hold of my arm. The grass rocked under me – maybe I wasn't as good at walking in heels as I'd thought I was, either.

"As in, you could get seriously injured if you do it without a helmet?"

Anna giggled. I'd probably never get used to the fact that I had the ability to make this girl laugh. The sight and sound of it was a blast of solar energy, and harnessing it made me feel like having that much power for myself was wrong. I opened my mouth to say so, but Mayor Westerguard was motioning us over with his camera. The others were moving around into some formation, and in half a second Anna was going to detach from me and pair up with Hans. How dumb would it have been to tell Anna that her laugh had me feeling like I held the remote for a torpedo?

"Okay," Eric said. "How are we doing this?"

"Group, then couples?" said Hans's mom, a pear shaped woman with thick red glasses.

"No," Anna said, "Let's do couples first."

"You should stand in front of the willow." Ariel's dad pointed over his daughter's head with his cane; he was easily the tallest person there, and definitely stood out with his white ponytail and long beard.

"Okay," Ariel said. "Who's going first? Should we go?"

Pictures didn't take as long as they might have, since there were only six of us – Anna and Hans, Ariel and Eric, and me and Shang (the other half of the group was doing pictures at Snow's, apparently, and would meet up with us at the restaurant). Shang and I went first, standing carefully and quietly next to each other while the Mayor and Shang's mom snapped our pictures. I hated the twenty eyes on me, the way I imagined the parents wondering, _Who is this girl? Where did she come from?_ I hated being the only one without someone there from home (Dad and Mom were in Washington D.C. for ten days) and how they probably pitied me for it. I hated that I noticed Anna watching Shang's hands loose at my waist, but Anna's aunt, Rose, pointed her camera at us too, and I felt a little better about not having parents there.

Even though they weren't here now, the "overprotective dad" trope still resurfaced when it came to Homecoming. I knew it would. I'd hoped it would. Since Dad and Mom were out of town, I'd had to tell them about it over the phone – but I could hear the raised eyebrow in Dad's voice, the way he squashed his smile as he told me I had to introduce Shang once he and Mom were back. I could tell that he loved the opportunity to say so to me.

Mom was sad that she couldn't go with me to buy my dress, but I'd promised I'd send her pictures of whatever I ended up with. I'd gone to the mall with Cindy and Anna; they already had their dresses picked out, but wanted to come with me without me even having to ask. I was more grateful than I could tell them. It wasn't like I was picky or anything, but I needed them with me to tell me what kind of dress was right for Homecoming. If I went by myself, I'd probably end up with the wrong kind, and then at the dance I'd be under the spotlight of a couple hundred side-eyes. But after just around half an hour of trying on whatever Anna or Snow tossed over the fitting room door, the three of us had decided on a simple ice-blue dress. It was form-fitting, but floor length – it made Cindy clap her hands together and say, "Yes, yes, this is it," and made Anna lift her eyebrows slowly and say, "This is _definitely_ it."

Watching Anna with Hans was the only part of pictures that seemed to drag on. Hans's arms wrapped around the black sweetheart cut bodice of Anna's dress, _snap snap click snap_, and his legs ruffled against the olive taffeta that billowed to her knees, _snap click snap_, and I thought it would never end. But she beamed like this was the best day of her life, so I couldn't be impatient.

After goodbyes to the parents and promises of good choices, the six of us piled into the van Hans was borrowing from his mom and drove to the restaurant. It was about six o'clock then, the grass streaking orange as the sun started to sink. The restaurant – Antonio's – was a low-ceilinged, red tablecloth and steady murmur kind of place. We went to our long table near the back, and found that the other half of the group was already there.

They gave small waves as we picked past the other tables. Cindy sat next to the boy whose name I still couldn't remember, along with Phillip, Snow, and a couple that I didn't know. Next to me, Anna faltered; she hissed breath in through her teeth and whispered, "What the _hell_?"

I frowned at Anna, then gave the table a quick scan. "What? What?"

Anna's eyes narrowed straight ahead, and a few of her fingers strayed to my elbow. "What is she _thinking_?"

I had no clue what she was talking about. It was enough trying to keep up with what I was supposed to be doing here, without an extra layer of confusion added on. I kept looking at Anna as I took my seat between Cindy and Shang, but she didn't meet my eye across the table or explain any further.

It was silent all around for a few seconds. Then Phillip cleared his throat and said, "Well, it took you guys long enough."

There were a few chuckles that quickly died. Something had made the dinner table stiflingly uncomfortable, and I felt like I was the only one who didn't see it. As far as I could tell, everyone was dressed nicely and looked normal. Was there something wrong with the guy and the girl I didn't recognize being there?

"So, Mulan," Hans said, squaring his shoulders with a deep breath. "Long time, no see." I followed where every gaze around the table was pointed to, and looked at the strange guy next to Snow.

…Oh. _Oh_. That guy was definitely a girl.

It was easy to tell after more than three seconds of looking. All I'd taken in initially was the suit jacket and the short hair, but now that I was paying attention, I registered the smooth long neck and thick lashes.

"Back at you, Hans," the short-haired girl said. Her voice was softer than I'd thought it would be. I didn't know what I'd thought it would be. I didn't want to keep staring, even though everyone else was, so I looked back to Anna. This time, she caught my eye for just a moment, biting her lip, before turning the rest of the way to whisper something to Ariel, who stared at the short-haired girl and frowned. Childishly, I felt jealous. Clearly there was something going on that I was too new to the friend group to pick up on.

"So, uh," Hans said. "What brings you to Homecoming?"

"I do," Snow said with a smile. She gave the short-haired girl, Mulan, a soft shoulder bump. The deep royal blue of Snow's scoop neck dress matched the other girl's tie – and when I realized this, all the color slid from the restaurant.

Snow had brought this girl as her date.

"Excuse me," I said, to no one in particular, and edged out of my seat. I kept myself fixed on a painting at the end of a hallway as I slipped away to the restroom, this huge Art Nouveau style painting of a tendril-haired woman holding a corset: "_BUSTO – INGIENICO – DUREVOLE – ECONOMICO"_. I'd have to ask Anna later if she thought the corset gave the woman in the painting sore ribs. I'd ask later on, after I'd had a few minutes to breathe. I turned left at the painting and went into the women's room.

Once inside, I stood at the sink and blinked at my reflection. I smoothed my hair, and wiped at a few water droplets on the sink counter with a paper towel. Breathe in, breathe out. The fluorescent light bars overhead hummed, the only noise aside from the air whistling in my nostrils.

It wasn't like I was naïve enough to think that I'd never have to interact with other peoples'… _symptoms_. There were people like that out there – I knew that – and they didn't think the way that I thought. They didn't have to wear gloves. But it had never occurred to me that they might appear three feet away from me, that I might already know their names or how many packets of pepper they shook onto their salads. Maybe if I'd had some warning…

The door opened next to me and Anna came inside. I took a step backward as she put her palm on the lip of the sink with a furrowed brow.

"Hey, are you okay?" she said.

"Yeah," I said. "No, I'm fine." I wasn't used to being followed when I snuck off for air. I wasn't used to questions about it when I hadn't had time to plan an excuse.

Anna lifted her chin and eyed me. "You're bothered by Snow bringing Mulan, aren't you?"

I hated that she could read me. No one was supposed to read anything, I was better at hitting backspace and clearing the screen than nearly anything else. "Um. I, uh…" My back bumped the towel dispenser.

Anna sighed and squeezed the bridge of her nose. My shoulders sagged as I realized – Anna was annoyed with me. She'd never looked at me like this before. "Listen, I have no idea what your views are on this. Honestly, we're all surprised to see Mulan here. But whatever it is that you're thinking about Snow's decisions – you can't make her uncomfortable, okay?"

The thin wrist dangling at the olive billow of Anna's dress seemed out of place somehow, seemed too small of a girl-wrist for such a dress. I didn't know what to say. Right now, in this moment, I didn't know what I could possibly say to Anna ever again. I opened my mouth, and all I had was, "I won't."

Anna gave me one of those studying looks that I hadn't seen since we'd first met. I swelled with the dread that whatever she appraised, it would erase what she saw in me that was good. But then Anna heaved a rattling exhale and turned to the mirror. "I know. You know? I know you're not like that. It's just… I don't know." Anna dragged her palms down her cheeks. "Tonight's weird. I shouldn't have jumped on you."

I held my breath. I remembered a time when I was seven, taken to my first and last horseback riding lesson – the way I'd hung back around the massive, sliding-muscled brown animal. That unsure feeling seeped back in now, but I pulled myself a few small steps closer anyway. "Are _you_ okay?"

Anna turned from her reflection and looked back at me with a thoughtful, half-open mouth. She paused. Maybe she was studying me again. Maybe she was deciding how much to say. I couldn't tell – Anna looked down at my waist, where my dress clung ice blue, and bit her lip like she was going to say something that might catch the air as it left my throat, when –

The door flew open, and Ariel slipped inside. "You guys, it is all kinds of awkward out there. You have got to come back out and save me."

Anna slumped against the sink and groaned. "I know, I know. It's just – Ariel, why couldn't Phillip have just asked her? Please, tell me why my life is so difficult."

Ariel tugged up on the neckline of her pink strapless, rolling her eyes. "Your life? Girl, I know your sympathy levels are at mutant status, but your life has got to be the most normal out of all of ours. No offense," she added, turning to me. "I don't really know anything about yours. It's more the fact that you're here with Shang, which – ouch, sorry." Ariel winced at me, for some reason.

"What's wrong with Shang?" As far as I knew, there was nothing wrong with him – at least by Ariel's standards, and my own, so far. He was smart, polite, and athletic. He seemed fine to me.

Anna and Ariel exchanged a glance. "Mulan is Shang's ex," Anna finally said.

I blinked. "Oh. So…" I blanked. "So that girl used to date…" I drew a zig-zagging line in the air with my index finger.

Ariel gave a slow _'I know, right'_ nod. "Like, if it was with anyone else's ex showing up at Homecoming I'd be like, get over it, right? But after what happened with her…"

"Well, I'm not gonna say anyone is more justified being salty with an ex just because they broke up over the other person coming out." Anna shot Ariel a scrunched-mouth frown. "But either way, she's still a sore subject for Shang, and Snow knows that."

"Totally," Ariel said. "You know she's just doing this to get a reaction out of Phillip."

"Doing what," I said, "Bringing a girl?" There were so many more layers to this than I could have imagined. The friend group was like the football field when I'd gone to my first game – it was a rug that only unfurled completely once you looked at it from inside of its own action.

"Yeah," Anna said. "I mean, don't get me wrong. If she's into Mulan, that's cool. But she's been so into Phillip ever since this summer, and the fact that he's not going for it is only making her more frustrated."

"And she's trying to get more creative about making it happen," Ariel said.

"Preeeeetty much."

"I don't think she gets that it's not gonna happen," Ariel said. "Like, it's not her fault. It's just that she reminds him too much of Aurora. Since they were best friends he associates Snow with her."

Anna's shoulders rose and fell. "I know." Her voice sloped down on the words. I was totally rapt, and Anna must have noticed, because she turned to me and explained, "Aurora was dating Phillip when she died."

"And Eric told me," Ariel went on, "That he said if he's going to get with someone, he's more into it being someone new. You know? Someone not part of the group. That's why he brought Jaz."

Jaz. That must have been the other girl next to Mulan, the girl I hadn't even really looked at, thanks to the Mulan drama. Poor Mulan. I didn't know anything about her other than that she was… she was like _that_, and had dated Shang, and now she was here with Snow – had she gone to Arendelle at some point? But from what it sounded like, all this fuss was happening _around_ her, rather than directly _because_ of her. Unless there was a deliberate plot between her and Snow to ruin some lives tonight, which I kind of couldn't see happening. But something else that Ariel had said stuck with me.

"That would explain why he asked me," I said.

"Wait, what?" Anna said. She and Ariel both stopped and looked at me. I hesitated. Had I said something wrong?

"Uh… yeah, he asked me to go with him. After Shang did." The toe of my right shoe ground against the tile. "I said no." Well, obviously.

"Oh my god," Ariel said to the ceiling with a short laugh. "Okay, well thank god _that_ didn't happen. Here I was thinking it couldn't get any worse than this, but it looks like we dodged a bullet."

Anna wasn't laughing. She stared at me like I'd just told them I'd nearly driven my car off a bridge the other day. "Okay, Snow can't know about that," she said. "Seriously. I mean, Elsa, she _likes_ you. And she wouldn't actually blame you or anything. But…"

"I get it," I said. And I really did, somehow. I thought of Hans's arms around Anna's stomach – _click click snap click_. "It doesn't matter who it is – when it comes to that kind of thing you can't force yourself to be neutral, no matter what you know is logical."

Ariel nodded with wandering eyes, like she hadn't thought about it that way. Anna stayed trained on me, appraising _again_, and I fidgeted. What must it have been like to analyze someone without the fear of them noticing you do it? Was that a confidence I could never get without a full-sized chunk of normal school under my belt? Eventually, Anna turned back to Ariel, and they agreed on going back out there before the waitress came around asking drink orders. I trailed behind them down the short hallway, and a glance at the painting of the Italian corset lady had me opening my mouth to ask Anna what she thought. Then it struck me –

What the hell had made me think of Hans's arms around Anna back there?

I closed my mouth – opened it again – closed it back up – and then resumed my walking behind them.

I barely listened throughout dinner, punching forkholes in the thickest parts of the Portobello parmigiana I ordered – and I grappled with the thought. Why did I care about Hans's arms, and what they did? What was it that had them flash in my brain when I thought about being neutral? I glanced across the table every now and then at Hans as he elbowed Cindy's date and chuckled into Anna's ear. I hadn't really talked to him in a while, had I? But I still liked him. And why wouldn't I?

He never caught my eye, but Anna did, a few times. We didn't speak to each other during dinner, just snagged one another as we dragged our eyes across the laughing table.

Shang was as quiet as I was, but at least he probably understood his own reasons.

Before I knew it, we were piled into the cars, rolling down the street to Arendelle for the dance. In the tire-humming dark inside Mrs. Westerguard's van, we all looked out of place in our ties and precise makeup. Suddenly, I felt very small. My date was tall, like a grown man, but he barely looked anywhere but at his dry-skinned knuckles, so being with him didn't help me at all. All that helped was that everyone else looked like kids playing dress-up, too.

This was my second time going inside the gymnasium. My first time had only been yesterday, at the pep rally for the Homecoming game; I'd sat in the very top row of the bleachers with Ali, half-listening to his commentary, and watched how puzzlingly easy it looked for the cheerleaders to smile like it was the most natural thing in the world to look so content. Watching Anna the way she was down there was different, because with that much space between us, she didn't know I existed. I could see how she'd looked before I'd ever met her. I could see what the slant of her cheeks would have been like when she'd hoisted Aurora's sneaker with her palms locked together.

She was no different now, having met me. No part of my presence in her life would change anything about her.

The puzzle of Hans's arms still insisted itself at the dance itself, but it took a backseat as I took in everything new. The others processed into the bass-pulsing gym like they did this every Saturday, but I dragged my feet staring up at the lavender crepe paper cocoons that hung from the ceiling, each of them as big as a beach ball. The bright, enthusiastic lights that lit up the gym at yesterday's rally were dimmed now, and covered with some filters that made the space murky. It took my eyes a minute to adjust, but once they did, I found that folding tables fanned out in front of me and the middle of the glossed wood floor was packed with a crush of bare-shouldered and necktied moving bodies.

The dancing part of the dance was suddenly very real to me. I faltered reaching the tables, and the music boomed all around me – was it supposed to be this loud?

"_-out of my cage and I've been doing just fine, gotta gotta be-"_

"Come on!" I heard hot in my ear, as a hand grabbed mine. Anna grinned over her shoulder, pulling me toward the dancing. A steel bar locked up my spine.

"Wait!" I said, feeling myself sounding shrill as I tried to speak over the music.

"_-how did it end up like this, it was only-"_

Snow and Mulan went by as Anna stopped with my stiff arm. "I don't know how to dance!" I said.

Anna laughed. "Me neither!" She took my other hand in hers and started to pull. "Now, come on! I love this song!"

"_-sick, and it's all in my head, but she's touching-"_

I resisted again, feeling helpless. Everything was so loud, so _much_. "I… I can't…"

"_-let me go-"_

Anna looked down at our joined hands, then dropped them. "I'm totally weirding you out, aren't I?"

"No!"

Hans and Eric passed by, followed by Ariel and Cindy's date. Anna glanced at them, rubbing her arm, then back at me. "I guess I got kind of carried away! Forget it!" And before I could say anything, she shrugged with a lopsided smile and went after the others, leaving me standing there like a tree stump.

"_-calling me, open up my eager eyes-"_

I couldn't pick out Shang anywhere, so I went off to the restrooms to avoid just standing off to the side by myself.

The act of walking to a high school gymnasium restroom in the dress I was wearing had me feeling so ears-burnt foolish that I could hardly stand to hear the click of my heels. I pushed open the heavy swinging door and went by Cindy and that other girl – Phillip's date – at the sinks.

"Hey," I said, when they looked up.

"Hey, you," Cindy said, smiling around her lip gloss.

"Hey," the other girl said, glancing at me through her reflection – did Ariel say her name was Jaz? I felt like maybe I'd seen her around Arendelle; the thick black hair and frowning dark eyes registered somewhat, although her being in a loose teal-ish dress and not in the uniform made her harder to place.

I waited in a stall until I heard them leave – then waited for a few more minutes – then figured I couldn't spend the whole dance in a bathroom stall. God, I was totally ditching Shang, wasn't I? If I kept up like this, after tonight he'd have a complex about women. Not to mention – I was his date, and he must have been feeling low about Mulan. I washed my hands for good measure and hurried out of the restroom; if Shang was dancing in the middle of everyone else, well – I didn't know what I'd do, but I'd just have to play it by ear.

Walking out towards the throbbing nucleus of the noise had my chin lifted higher than it had been walking away from it. Of course I could do this. This sound, this ceremony – all of it was just high school. I'd been to hell and back on the spinning arrow of my own compass, and none of these kids could hurt me the way I'd hurt myself.

Not even Anna. She may have been the Girl From The Ice Rink, but to myself I was a cyclone, and Anna was only a girl.

I hung back when I reached the tables, scanning for Shang. I caught a glimpse of Hans's sideburns, sweating, but Shang was taller than Hans and his black buzzcut head wasn't bobbing anywhere around.

"He's in the bathroom," a voice said. I pushed off the chair I'd been leaning my hand on and looked around; it was Mulan, Snow's short-haired date, sitting elbows-to-knees at the same table.

"Oh," I said. No need to guess who she meant.

My eyes wandered to the DJ's setup and Mulan said, "But it's only been about a minute. He shouldn't be long."

"Got it." That unsure riding-lesson feeling crept back, but I pulled out the chair I'd been leaning on and sat down next to Mulan anyway. There wasn't anything else for me to do right now. There wasn't anything for me to say, either, and that's why we sat in silence.

"Where's Snow?" I asked abruptly. Mulan just shrugged, and the conversation hit another dead end. Part of me was relieved; manners prodded me to keep it going, but I just couldn't look at the squared shoulders of a girl who went to Homecoming with another girl and still breathed so evenly. I couldn't stand – or really _under_stand – the thought of someone who could ignore the Paths and just burn down the entire forest instead.

"Hey," I heard at my shoulder. It was Shang, three fingers tapping light on the top bar of my chair. Surprisingly enough, he looked down at me with a relaxed forehead.

"Hey!" I said, relieved to be rescued by someone I knew.

"Want to dance?"

"Well…" My hand curled into itself where it rested on the table. I thought of Anna's warm tugging grip, and suddenly, could practically smell Gene's mushroom breath next to my neck as I heard him say, "Yes. Say yes!"

"I don't do grinding, either," Shang said, rolling his eyes, "But look, it's a slow one now." And he was right – the music had waned in tempo, and all the people dancing started to slow with hands to shoulders, hands to waists.

It didn't seem so hard, like this.

"Sure," I said, and stood up. I felt like courtesy should have me saying goodbye or something to Mulan, but courtesy to Shang meant minimizing that she was even here. I compromised with myself and gave Mulan a quick glance – at least acknowledging that she _existed_ – before following Shang out to where people were dancing.

"Are you having fun?" he said, once we had begun to sway.

"Yeah, this whole thing is pretty interesting."

"Good."

"What about you?" I said. Standing close like this, I had to tilt my head back to keep eye contact.

"I'm good," Shang said. There was a long pause.

"_-drape your wrists over the steering wheel, pulses can drive from-_"

"I'm sorry about Mulan."

Shang's hands twitched at my waist as he looked down at me, clear surprise on the lines at the corners of his mouth. "So they told you about that already?"

"Yeah."

"_-houses don't change, where we can talk like there's something to say-_"

Shang looked away and smiled. "It's not exactly a secret. She was pretty famous at Arendelle when she came out."

The back of my neck prickled, for some reason – I couldn't help it. "What happened?"

"It's a small school, and kids are mean." He was still smiling, but in the shadows of the low, turning lights, the expression looked like it came from a canker sore. "I think you can guess."

My wrists tightened toward each other where they rested behind Shang's neck, and I was silent.

"_-wearing long sleeves and the heating comes on-_"

"It wasn't right," Shang said, after a minute. His nose pointed at my shoes. "She didn't deserve that at all."

I had no words to express it, but I had to agree – not letting myself think a thing about flames licking the wood and dry leaves around a Path. Maybe she had no Paths. Maybe she'd been in an open field all along.

"Elsa." It was Anna, standing in front of Shang and I with hands clasped behind her back. She gave me a tiny, sheepish grin, and I found myself suddenly clumsy. "Can I steal you for a minute?"

"Ah…" I glanced up at Shang.

"Go ahead," he said, letting his hands drop from my waist. "I'm going to get some air." And with a brief smile, "Thanks, Elsa."

And I was alone with Anna in the middle of the dance floor. The song went on –

"_-done with killing time, can I kill it with you, 'til-_"

– and I made myself look at Anna. She pursed her lips, shifted her weight, and before I knew it her palms were pressed to my hips. I brought my arms up to her shoulders in response, purely out of instinct – my eyes were probably as round as quarters. What was she doing? What were we doing? What was I doing?

"So listen," Anna said, as though swaying back and forth with me was the most natural thing in the world. "I want to apologize again for attacking you like that at the restaurant."

I stepped from one foot to the other in time with the music, going through the motions and trying to catch up with the fact that this was apparently a normal way to have a conversation with a friend. "It's fine," I said.

Anna shrugged, and the motion had her hands moving just slightly where they rested on me – god, I had to forget that they were filled with blood and were Anna's, and that didn't help. "But you have to say that," Anna said, "because you're sweet. What I did was make an assumption, and I forgot all about how hard all this must be for you."

"_-glad that we stopped kissing tar on the highway-_"

She was talking about being at a dance. "You don't need to hold my hand," I said. I remembered where her hands actually were. "I mean – I mean, you shouldn't be worrying about me. Enjoy the dance. I'll be fine."

Anna laughed, but she laughed down at the crook of her arm, instead of long-neck laughing over my head like she usually did. "You know, one day this whole martyr thing is gonna get old." She tilted her head to the side. "But for now, I guess I'll deal with it."

Warmth sizzled from the bridge of my nose across my cheeks. We were still moving from side to side. "Do you have a choice?" I said with a nonchalance I did not feel.

"Unfortunately not." Anna smirked, eyes crinkling with some kind of challenge I couldn't decode. She seemed to have been challenging me every step of the way, since I'd met her. It was just how she was.

"You're sure you're okay?" Anna went on. "I really am sorry."

Gene sat in my ear canal, calling out advice on how to say, no, I wasn't okay because Snow and Mulan weren't okay. I wasn't okay because everyone seemed to be ill, and no one was quarantined. My arms vibrated in stretching out to Anna's shoulders, shaking my body in a lazy whipcrack that went from those touched wrists all the way down to my ankles.

"_-and I like you, and I like you, and I like you-_"

"It's all right," I said. "I mean it."

"Great," Anna said, spreading into a grin. Before I knew it, she pulled me into a hug – there with her cheek at my neck, I felt her say, "You're the best."

And as she pulled away, leaving me bare with the end of the song, I knew they weren't the fullest words a person could say to someone else. But I responded, "I know. You're okay too." And I wondered if Anna knew just how full my words really were. She grabbed my hand to give it a squeeze; after I declined her invitation to join her for this song, and watched her bounce back to Hans, I knew I didn't want her to feel the weight of anything I said.

Because I got another look at Hans's arm curling around Anna, pulling her in, and it was with a sour-mouthed sickness that I realized what it was that I saw.

I saw the flames of envy, lapping at the floorboards and crawling towards me. It wasn't just the wisp of the match, anymore – it was orange, and hungry, and alive, and it was still going to swallow me whole.

I was attracted to Anna.

* * *

_Music: Mr. Brightside by The Killers, 400 Lux by Lorde._


End file.
